Announcer:

You’re listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Liz Covart:

Ben Franklin’s World is a production of the Omohundro Institute and is sponsored by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

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Hello and welcome to episode 334 of Ben Franklin’s World, the podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped the present day world we live in. And I’m your host, Liz Covart.

Although many of us view early American history through the eyes of the English and later British, Spanish explorers and colonists visited, settled, and claimed territory in 42 of the 50 states that now comprise the United States. When thought of this way, it seems clear that we should view much of the history of early America through a Spanish lens and point of view and that’s what we’re going to do today.

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Brandon Bayne, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, joins us to investigate some of the religious aspects of Spanish colonization. Specifically, we’re going to explore Spanish missionaries, their work and why this work was carried out by just a few religious orders, namely the Franciscans and the Jesuits. Now, during our exploration Brandon reveals information about New Spain, its borderlands, and the ways in which Spanish and Indigenous peoples interacted within those borderlands, the work of Catholic missionaries and Spain’s use of missionaries as instruments of colonization and details about the Jesuits, their work in New Spain and why the Spanish crown ultimately expelled the Jesuits from New Spain in 1767.

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But first, I’ll be in New Orleans this Saturday, July 23rd, and I’ll be hosting a meetup at Pat O’Brien’s restaurant at 4:00 p.m. Meetups are a really fun way for me to get to know you and for you to get to know me and for you to have the chance to meet other listeners who share your interest in early American history. As we are meeting at a restaurant, please let me know if you’re coming or if you think you’ll be coming. You can RSVP at benfranklinsworld.com/meetup. That’s benfranklinsworld.com/meetup, and I’ll reserve us a table so that we can sit and chat.

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All right, are you ready to venture into the history of New Spain and its missionary work? Let’s go meet our expert guide.

Joining us is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He specializes in the history of European and Indigenous encounters in the Americas and in the religious history of the Americas. He’s written articles, book chapters and a book, Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Borderlands of New Spain. Welcome to Ben Franklin’s World, Brandon Bayne.

Brandon Bayne:

Thank you, Liz. It’s an honor to be here. I’ve listened to this podcast for a long time and learned a lot from you and from your guests and so I’m happy to be able to talk a bit about my own research.

Liz Covart:

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That’s really good news for us, Brandon because we’re really excited to explore the histories of New Spain, its missions, and more about European and Indigenous encounters in the area you study, which is northern New Spain. Now I think where we should start our exploration of these big topics is with some terminology. So one of your research specialties is in the history of European and Indigenous encounters and you talk about contact zones of the Americas in your book, Missions Begin with Blood. Could you help us better understand what you mean by contact zones and about the different places where encounters between Indigenous and European peoples happened in the early Americas?

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Brandon Bayne:

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Yeah, I took the phrase contact zone from a mentor of mine, David Carrasco, who’s an anthropologist of meso-America at Harvard. Carrasco himself borrowed it from the cultural theorist, Mary Louise Pratt, who used the term in an article called the “Arts of the Contact Zone”, in which she theorizes that contact zones are social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical power relations, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they’re lived out in many parts of the world today.

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In his own work on meso-American encounters between Maya and Nawa communities and Catholic missionaries, Carrasco argued that we must pay attention both to the violence of the conquest and that true asymmetrical power involves not just in the Spanish conquest, but the alliance that they assembled with other Indigenous groups. But also pay attention to the way in which Native communities responded creatively to that conquest. To not just privilege the story of the conquest, but to look at material and physical and cultural productions that came out of it that were really markers of a third space. They were neither purely European nor purely some sort of imagined, pristine pre-contact Indigenous religion, but they’re things that really come out of the contact itself. That the contact zone itself produces both violence and cultural and religious creativity.

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For me, I found that term helpful to think about space as I wrote about missions in northern New Spain, and to think about contact and confrontation. And confrontation here, I think about as being both what we might immediately think of as physical and violent confrontation, but also confrontación Spanish means comparison, to put two things beside each other and to compare. I wanted to look at the ways that both missionaries and Indigenous communities were engaged in acts of comparison and trying in messy ways to parse out this experience that they had found themselves in.

Liz Covart:

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That’s a really interesting way to think about conflict, this Spanish idea of confrontation or comparison, because I think that’s really what happens to us when we encounter a new culture. I think we’ve all been in situations where we’ve visited a new state or a new country, and we immediately start comparing the new culture that we’re encountering with our own culture. I believe this is part of human instinct and if we think about it, comparing what we know with what we don’t know is what helps us make sense of the new culture that we’re experiencing. I would add to this, that one of the ways that I like to encounter new cultures and compare what is new with what is familiar, is to try different foods anytime that I travel. I think that seeing a new culture through your stomach is one of the great ways to try and really get to know people who are different from you.

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Brandon Bayne:

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Food’s a great example. For example, there’s no pure taco. The things that we think about as the essential and pure taco, the tacos al pastor, for instance, really came out of a cultural confrontation in comparison with Middle Eastern, Lebanese and Syrian immigrants to Mexico, who adopted the shwarma to Indigenous American ideas and most notably using pork and pineapple. And yet the tacos al pastor considered to be the most authentic and pure form of the taco today and really they’re a result of a much later combination that came out of immigration and came out of situations of violence in the Middle East that inspired immigration. So food’s a great way of thinking about it.

Liz Covart:

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Now, we’re going to spend much of our conversation today talking about New Spain, which if we were to look at it on a map, is going to consist of a lot of North and South America. But we’re also going to focus on a specific region of New Spain, which Brandon calls the borderlands of New Spain. Brandon, would you tell us about the borderlands of New Spain and really help us place those borderlands and their geographical boundaries on our mental maps of the Americas?

Brandon Bayne:

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The term borderlands has a long and contested scholarly history and I don’t think we need to go too deep here. The term really traces back to Herbert Eugene Bolton. Bolton really didn’t theorize the term and for him, it generally seemed to refer to the civilizational institutions of the Spanish enterprise in North America. He wanted to establish that Jesuit missionaries were just as important as French trappers or English Puritans and what constituted what became the United States and to undo the legacy of the Black legend of Spanish cruelty.

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I chose to use it despite the fact that some scholars have pushed back against it because I believe it gets to what I was talking about earlier with a contact zone of the way in which Europeans imagined frontiers as ever expanding spaces where they were attempting to bring Indigenous land and Indigenous practices within Christendom. But there have been others like Juliana Barr, I think who have rightly and convincingly argued that the term borderlands can center the European imagination in a way that does not get at the reality of Indigenous territorial dominance in a lot of these spaces.

Liz Covart:

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If we’re looking at a map of North and South America, where would we see the boundaries claimed by Spain as New Spain? What are the boundaries of New Spain and where are the borderlands of New Spain on that map?

Brandon Bayne:

In its most basic form, we might think of New Spain as overlapping mostly with what’s now Mexico, but it also included Central America. It included for a time what’s now the state of Florida up to where you’re at in Virginia and the Jesuit mission of Ajacán and all the way south into Central America and then to what’s now northern Latin America.

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Another interesting fact is beginning in the 1540s, New Spain included the Philippines and the Pacific Archipelagos of the Spanish enterprise in Asia. Really, when we talk about New Spain, we’re talking about a wide swath of territory that included parts of the Americas, the Caribbean and the Pacific. More specifically, it was a vice royalty and a vice royalty was a division or jurisdiction within the Spanish empire that was meant to facilitate governance so that the monarch or the crown wasn’t governing all of this territory directly. New Spain was the first of the vice royalties and really the largest. In many ways, one of the most influential, lasting from the initial contacts in what’s the mainland of Mexico, 1518, 1519, all the way up to Mexican independence in the ’18 teens and 1820s.

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Liz Covart:

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I think we can tell from the mental maps that Brandon just helped us paint, that Spain really claimed huge swaths of global territory as New Spain. If we stop to think about this, even if we just limit our view of New Spain from Mexico north into the North American interior, we can see that hundreds, if not thousands of Indigenous groups, would’ve called New Spain home. Brandon who were and are these Indigenous peoples that called New Spain home? Would you tell us about the Indigenous peoples that you researched for your study and book, Missions Begin with Blood?

Brandon Bayne:

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As you just said, there are hundreds of diverse Indigenous peoples living within the far flung territories that Europeans called New Spain. Probably the most well known are the Maya that occupied the Yucatan, Chiapas into Central America, as well as the Nawa speaking peoples that lived in central Mexico, especially the central valley of Mexico, where the Mexica triple alliance was subsequently known as the Aztecs. For my own work, I focus on the west of what’s now Mexico and into the northwest and parts of what’s now southwestern United States, specifically Arizona and southern California.

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The groups that were there included the Purépecha or Tarascans in Michoacán, which is where I begin the story and it turns to the Otomí of Guanajuato, then moving up the coast in the Sinola where you have various Cahíta speaking peoples, Tehuecos, Mayos; in Sonora: Eudeves, Ópatas, Jumas, Jumanos, Seris, Inde or Apache, Pericús, Quechan, Quaycurá communities in California.

Probably the group that I focused on in the most depth and had the most contact with in the present as I gave some of my research to elders within the community, are Oʼodham people that live today in northern Sonora and southern and into central Arizona.

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Liz Covart:

Okay, so now that we know some of the names of the people who lived and live in New Spain’s northern borderlands, what do we actually know about Spanish settlement and Spanish colonization of New Spain? As we said, there are hundreds of different Indigenous peoples who live in this area, so how did the process of Spanish colonization work in New Spain when you had such rich and vibrant Indigenous populations?

Brandon Bayne:

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Of course, Spain here is a bit of an anachronism. We’re talking about Castile and Aragon and other Iberian kingdoms, including Portugal. But they employ a range of practices from the beginning, probably most famously they began to use a practice called encomienda, which means trusteeship. This was a system in which people who were willing to travel and engage in the settlement and colonization of the Americas were entrusted with Indigenous territory and Indigenous people. So they became trustees or encomenderos. Not directly owning these territories and people, but entrusted with them on behalf of the crown. Now in exchange for having the right to exploit Native land and resources and labor and bodies, they were charged with civilizing and educating and hopefully Christianizing these Indigenous people. Now, this was often honored more in the breach than in the practice as we know from the critiques of someone like Bartolomé de las Casas who is accusing encomenderos of regular abuse and failing in their duties to evangelize or to educate.

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And you have others like Guaman Poma de Ayala in the Andes as well, that is mounting sustained critique against the abuses and lack of delivering on the responsibilities of encomenderos. So the crown attempts to adjust to this in various ways throughout the 16th century, most famously in 1542 passes what’s called the new laws, which tries to reign in the power of the encomenderos functionally end the encomienda and replace it with different systems of taxation and evangelization. Again, this is something that’s more of an ideal coming from Spain than something that immediately changed things on the ground.

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For my own work, probably more important or as important are the new ordinances of 1573, which said that any new exploration, any expansion of the frontiers of the Spanish enterprise, particularly in New Spain, would have to be under the charge of missionaries. What this did was officially give the justification that the reason that Europeans were entering into Indigenous territories, the reason that the contact zones were coming about, was for the supposedly loving goal of sharing the gospel.

Liz Covart:

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You mentioned encomenderos who were people who received land and labor grants, or encomiendas from the Spanish crown in order to enslave Indigenous peoples and use their labor and land for profit. And you also mentioned that it was up to these encomenderos as well as other colonists to civilize Indigenous peoples in New Spain and convert them to Catholicism. Where did this order come from? Who said, “You need to go out and convert Indigenous peoples to Catholicism.” Was this a crown order? A papal charge, something that missionaries just delegated to civilians like themselves? Or was this a request from Indigenous peoples themselves saying, “We want to convert to Catholicism?”

Brandon Bayne:

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Well, not from the Indigenous people themselves, although I think that we can complicate some of the ways that that’s been told, to point to situations where Native people are requesting missions. But I guess another piece to add alongside understanding the encomienda, is the system of Patronato real, royal patronage. This came out of some agreements throughout the 1480s and 1490s, right in the midst of exploration and discovery, where the papacy agreed with Spain and with Portugal, that they would be the patrons of exploration and evangelization in Americas and throughout the world.

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And the bulls that put this forward are known as the Bulls of Donation beginning in the 1490s, probably most famously Exsurge domine[1] which basically lay out a long hierarchy of transition which assert that God is the creator of the world and God donated dominion of the world to his son, Christ. Christ donated that dominion to Peter. Peter, to his successors and the papacy. The current pope at that time, who was a Borgia himself from Spain and tied to Spanish monarchy, donated then that power over to the crown of Castile and Aragon and then they in turn entrusted that power to the encomienderos. So it’s a long chain of being from God as creator to the encomienderos who’s actually going to affect the change.

Liz Covart:

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Now your book, Missions Begin with Blood, really focuses on missionizing aspects of Spanish colonization and colonialism. And missions and mission work is something I’d like for us to focus on for a bit. If we look at the North American context, both Spain and France use Catholic missionaries to help colonize territories that these European crowns all across the Atlantic Ocean in Europe, claimed on a map for their nations and empires. Brandon, could you tell us how Spain and perhaps even France used Catholic missionaries as tools or perhaps an even better word might be instruments of colonization?

Brandon Bayne:

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Yes, you’re right that both France and Spain used missionaries to help colonize and settle the Americas. Scholars have long compared New Spain and New France sometimes pointing to their similarities, but also to diverging practices. Both used missionaries to make contact with Indigenous communities to facilitate trade, to establish alliances, and hopefully convert to Christianity, marking their bodies and land as part of Christendom. However, they also differed in substantial ways in part because the colonization of New Spain began over a century earlier than that of New France and it entailed working with much larger populations with substantial material and physical control over their environment. And in many cases, sedentary. There were cities, large cities in the case of Tenochtitlan and Tawantinsuyu in the Andes.

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In the Spanish case, you have missionaries arriving, Dominicans working in the Caribbean as early as the 1490s. Las Cases who I mentioned myself, earlier goes as an encomendero, comes a Dominican and is working in the 15 teens and 1520s through the 1550s. And the case of Mexico, or central New Spain where Cortez arrives in 1518, 1519, enters into Tenochititlan it’s really shortly thereafter that 1524, that he brings 12 Franciscans to affect really this charge of the encomendero. To affect the education, civilization and Christianizing the people of central Mexico. Those 12 Franciscans, that number was chosen for a reason. They’re imagined to be 12 apostles of the new world that will restart the church in the Americas. There’s all sorts of millennial and utopian ideas about what that will look like.

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I think this differs from New France in that going back to the royal patronage, these missionaries from the beginning are charged with evangelization, but they’re being employed directly by the crown. Then under encomenderos in the earlier periods at least, with a more comprehensive goal than just Christian evangelization. They are trying to facilitate the incorporation of Indigenous people into New Spain, into the body politic of New Spain. I think this differs from New France and English colonies on the Atlantic in that there’s an explicit goal of incorporating Indigenous peoples into Christendom as it’s being imagined, rather than pushing them out or trying to sideline or exterminate them.

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Allan Greer, who’s a scholar of Jesuit missions in New France has argued that the smaller populations, harsh physical climate and conditions in New France, and also just the limited ambitions of New France, which was primarily imagined originally as a trading colony rather than as a large scale form of settler colonialism, meant that you don’t see New France, the comprehensive attempts at the reorganization of Indigenous life that you see in New Spain or in Peru or Paraguay. Most famously probably for most people, if you’ve seen The Mission, you’re aware of what that looks like in terms of the creation of what are called reducciónes or reductions.

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These are spaces meant to facilitate Christian conversion, but at the same time teach technology, agriculture, Spanish, Latin, really a comprehensive vision of becoming a Spanish Christian. According to Greer and from my limited knowledge of New France, I think this is right. Not to say that there weren’t at times more comprehensive forms of reorganization of Native life in New France, but it wasn’t the structural goal and the scale of it wasn’t nearly as large as it was in New Spain.

Liz Covart:

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Before we dive into the process of how these Catholic missionaries met with Indigenous peoples, I wonder if we could talk about religious orders. You mentioned that France and Spain hired Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits to go out into the worlds of New Spain and New France and convert Indigenous peoples to Catholicism. Brandon, what do we know about these religious orders and why the French and Spanish crown chose these specific religious orders to carry out their work of colonization?

Brandon Bayne:

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All of these are religious orders and I just want to unpack that term religion a little bit here. They were called religious and for them that meant something different than it does to us today. To be religious in that period meant to live under a rule and that’s where the word comes from, religio means rule and the rule is a vow. It’s an agreement that we’re going to live by certain standards. This dates back to really early Christianity and late antiquity where you had groups forming in Egypt and Syria to agree to live under a rule. The early markers of that rule in most those cases was an agreement to live in poverty, to practice chastity and to perform obedience to a leader within the community. Those three aspects are the classic rule that makes up a religious order; poverty, chastity, obedience.

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This gets codified by Benedict of Nursia in one of the earliest religious orders in the west is the Benedictines. Certain reforms of that over time, the Cistercians and others. But in the 13th century, you have new movements that are focused on combating heresy and promoting evangelization in contested contact zones within Europe and spaces in which Christians are interacting with Jewish communities, Muslim communities in Spain, or other rival Christian communities to Roman Catholic dominance in France and in Italy. It’s there in the 13th century that you see the rival of the Franciscans, followers of St. Francis, also known as the OFM and followers of Domingo de Guzman, or St. Dominic in Spain, which is known as the order of preachers, OP and they each have their own kind of gifting. Dominicans focus on preaching and contesting heresy, Franciscans focus on reenacting the apostolic life and particularly a radical vision of poverty and simplicity.

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But both of those, what distinguishes them is they’re Mendicants, which means they’re beggars. They don’t own property and they move. They move for the purpose of preaching and for the purpose of mission. Francis famously wants to go on mission to the Holy Land and wants to debate Muslims about Christianity in the hopes of converting them. I think this is what adapts both groups, their ability to move, their specialization in reenacting the vita apostolica Ain the case of the Franciscans, apostolic life and preaching, a preaching mission in the case of Dominicans.

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Now, the Jesuits are slightly different in that they get going about 300 years later. So they’re the newcomers on the scene when colonialism is happening and they happen to be perfectly adapted, I think, to European global ambitions. This is because they don’t form as a traditional religious order. In fact, they never use that term. They call themselves a society in English. In Latin and Spanish they’re called company or compañía, a fellowship. That can evoke marshal imagery, has traditionally because its founder, Ignatius Loyola had been a soldier. You think about a company in that sense as a military company.

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But I think it also is predicated on the fact that they take a fourth vow, which is different than any other order. Their fourth vow is to go wherever it is that the pope sends them. That word send is important because in Latin that’s missionare. In effect, when we talk about the word missionary, it’s the Jesuits that most fully incorporate that into their identity or their charism, which is their particular gifting as an order. They immediately, established in 1539, right thereafter began to send people out as missionaries under the papal direction. Most famous being Francis Xavier, who is one of the initial companions of Ignatius Loyola, who goes to India and then later dies en route to a mission to China.

Liz Covart:

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I don’t want to downplay the religious aspect of colonization because in my reading of the history of New Spain, Queen Isabella and the Spanish monarchs who succeeded her really did want to include and convert indigenous people’s into Christianity. As you were talking about these different religious orders, the fact that they don’t own property and that members have to take vows of poverty really sounds like it could be a great win for the Spanish crown in the sense that the Spanish crown can send missionaries from these orders to the Americas, really without fear or worry that these missionaries are going to lay claim to crown claimed lands.

Brandon Bayne:

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Well, I guess ideally it should be, but they’re immediately involved in contestations over property, contestations over control of land and resources. One of the main factors there was the fear by non Jesuits or the suspicion by non Jesuits, that the Jesuits had grown incredibly wealthy by their ownership of land and control over Indigenous labor. This, I have to say, my first job was at Fordham University, which is a Jesuit University and I did talk to a Jesuit dean there that was skeptical and pushed back a bit on my own research because he didn’t think it cast the Jesuits in the light that he thinks of them in terms of taking the vow of poverty really seriously.

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There’s the ideal of radical poverty and radical chastity and obedience, but there’s also always the messy reality of how that played out in the colonial sphere. In most those situations, I’m looking at you actually see settlers and colonists and crown officials jealous of Jesuit power and economic power and social power.

Liz Covart:

We should dig into this messy power situation, but first we really should take a moment to thank our episode sponsor.

[00:29:00]

Rob Parkinson:

Hi, I’m Rob Parkinson, associate professor of history at Binghamton University and my new book, 13 Clocks: How Race United Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence, published by the Omohundro Institute, is out now. This book covers the 15 months between Lexington and Concord and the Declaration of Independence. We think we know that story cold, especially in 1776, it is a straight march from Thomas Payne and Common Sense through Thomas Jefferson denouncing the king in the Declaration of Independence.

[00:29:30]

What I have found is we have forgotten so much of what happens in those 15 months and especially about the presence of African Americans and Native Americans in that story, and then worries and opportunities about how we can exploit these fears and use that as a basis for this extremely fragile thing of unity. Get your copy of 13 Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence, wherever you buy your books.

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Liz Covart:

To order your copy of Rob Parkinson’s 13 Clocks for the low price of $20, visit benfranklinsworld.com/clocks. That’s benfranklinsworld.com/clocks.

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As we mentioned earlier, in Missions Begin with Blood, which is Brandon’s book, Brandon really focuses on the Jesuits and their missionizing mission in New Spain. Brandon, what did the Jesuit missionizing mission look like on the ground? When the Spanish crown sent the Jesuits to New Spain, what task did the crown give the Jesuits? What was it like for the Jesuits to arrive in this new world and what was it like for the Jesuits to meet Indigenous peoples and for Indigenous peoples to meet the Jesuits?

Brandon Bayne:

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As I was explaining their origins, the Jesuits are late on the scene if we think about the 1490s being the inauguration of exploration, colonization in the Americas. The Jesuits weren’t a thing until the 1540s, really, and they aren’t formally commissioned to go to the Americas until the 1570s when the third general of the order of Francis Borgia begins to send them.

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Now, some Jesuits had come earlier to Brazil as early as 1549, but they’re still not the first in almost any theater. You’ve got the Dominicans there, Franciscans and Dominicans. One of the reasons they’re employed and eventually employed so heavily is because of what I had said earlier, that they do have this charism or gift of being mobile. They don’t live in monasteries or conventos in Spanish, so they’re not sedentary in that way. They are supposed to be mobile and be ready to be sent. That for them means either sent to a college or an educational institute for the purpose of training the children of elite families in Europe, and later in New Spain, or being sent on mission for the purpose of evangelizing Indigenous groups.

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What that looks like for them when they begin to arrive in New Spain in their 1570s, is it’s the wake of the critiques of Bartolomé de las Casas and others of the abuse of the early decades of colonization and the attempt following the new ordinances of 1573 to enact a form of exploration and evangelization that would be kinder and gentler, for lack of a better word. That wouldn’t directly be a part of conquest, but that would follow the recommendation of Las Casas of using persuasion. The Jesuit’s first missions in this regard were actually in North America, in Florida, in Virginia, in the Chesapeake region. And those very first missionaries that went to Florida and then later Ajacán in 1572 were immediately killed. I think that experience deeply informs the story that I trace in northwestern Mexico beginning in the 1580s, where they have given up on this vision about totally peaceful evangelization and are finding ways of working with soldiers and finding ways of being comfortable with the use of coercion and violence to establish the missions.

Liz Covart:

One of the calls that Jesuits could expect to receive were orders to attend a school in order to better prepare for their missionary work. Brandon, were these schools places where Jesuits could learn Indigenous languages so that they could better interact and communicate with Indigenous peoples to better affect their evangelism and perhaps lessen the violent encounters between Jesuits and Indigenous peoples?

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Brandon Bayne:

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The Jesuits are in part marked by the dedication to education. This is in many ways how we encounter them today. If we think about Georgetown in DC and Fordham and the many Jesuit universities throughout the country, we think about Jesuits and we think about education. From early on, they go through a long period of education. The society was really formed at the University of Paris as Loyola and Xavier and the other companions were studying. It’s formed by students from a university context, and I think it’s no accident they find themselves comfortable working in universities and colleges.

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Many of the missionaries that I’m looking at go through 13 plus years of education from late childhood into early adulthood that included philosophy, theology, European classical languages, the humanities, logic and rhetoric. For some of them, particularly those preparing for Asia, training in mathematics, astronomy, cartography. That’s the sort of training they have when they arrive as missionaries. But the training in Indigenous culture and languages often happens in the colleges and the novitiates of the insight.

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In Mexico, that was usually in Mexico City, sometimes in Puebla, which about two hours southeast of Mexico City and often in Tepotzotlán, which is about an hour north of Mexico City, where the Jesuits had their novitiate, meaning where they trained novices as they’re entering into these vocations and most of them eventually taking the fourth vow and becoming priests. That’s where they first learn indigenous languages in those colleges of central Mexico. They’re learning primarily Nawa, the language of central Mexico, which had become a lingua franca of the Spanish empire and of course, had been. The Spanish were only building on the networks that the Aztecs had assembled. These were trade networks that had used Nawa previously and the Spanish used that and worked with that.

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But I think the hope is that they would learn languages and produce things within Indigenous languages, grammars, catechisms, as they go. Famously, the Jesuits are often celebrated today as being early modern cultural relativists. You look at Asia, you see Francis Xavier, but later you see Matteo Ricci and others, Valignano in Japan, who for this idea of cultural accommodation where it’s okay to dress as a Confucian, it’s okay to use Mandarin and to adapt Christian theology and practice to the practices and languages. I have to say in Americas, that was not as common and we could talk about it more why that is. But the basic point is that the Jesuits regarded China as an equivalent civilization that didn’t need to be radically transformed, but rather accommodated to.

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But when they looked at most of the Indigenous communities of New Spain and it’s different when they looked at Mexico and Tenochtitlan they saw something that had the markers of civilization, had the cities, the literacy, the governance and temples and religious practices. They just wanted to reorient them or convert them to the worship of the true God in their imagination. But in the case of the Indigenous groups of what’s now the southern and southwestern United States and northern Mexico, these were more mobile groups. They were sedentary in some ways, but also practiced strategic movement and cultivation of wide range of territory.

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Jesuits largely thought of these groups as needing a total reorganization in order to have all the markers of civilization. Paired with the fact that many of these groups spoke mutually unintelligible languages, even on one river valley from town to town, they might travel 15 miles and find that the next group spoke a different language, after a few decades they give up on the idea of accommodation and begin to try to teach Latin and Spanish, which is a part of the comprehensive reorganization of Indigenous life.

Liz Covart:

You researched a lot of different missionaries for your book, Missions Begin with Blood. Say you’re one of these missionaries that you’ve researched, and you’ve just finished your training in Mexico, learning Nawa and all the different etiquette and work that you’ll need to do in order to accomplish the goals of your mission. Brandon, would you take us through this missionary’s journey from school in Mexico, into these contact zones and their interactions with Indigenous peoples?

[00:38:00]

Brandon Bayne:

Sure. As you say that I think of two particular missionaries that I feature in the book. The first of which is Gonzalo de Tapia, who I began the book with. Actually in the introduction, talk about my own encounter with Gonzalo de Tapia’s skull in the modern Jesuit headquarters in Mexico City and begin that as a point of thinking about what the resonance of these relics are and what the histories of them are.

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[00:39:00]

For someone like Gonzalo de Tapia, he’s born in mid 16th century, Leon, Spain, to an aristocratic family. He goes through that typical education. He is offered several high places within the society because of his wealth and aristocratic background. He had donated a substantial amount of his wealth to the society and for that, he was basically offered the world. If we think about Jesus in the desert, rejecting the temptations of the world, he’s figured as someone like that, who rejects wealth and rejects security to go to Mexico. In his case, he arrives not yet as a priest, not having professed his fourth vow, so he has to complete his novitiate, which includes going under training in the colleges of central Mexico.

[00:39:30]

He eventually is sent west to Michoacan, which is basically directly west of Mexico City to begin further training and study, but also begin a mission amongst the Purépecha, the Tarascans is the name that the Spaniards used. And he establishes a mixed record there, some success in that work, but also engenders some resistance. Then he’s sent back to undergo more training and eventually does profess his fourth vow, becomes a priest. Then is then sent to central Mexico, just north of Mexico City to Guanajuato to begin a mission amongst the Otomí. It’s there that he really establishes reputation as someone who can get so-called wandering peoples, people who moved to settle. To begin to settle into proto reductions.

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He established his reputation, going back to the language question, as someone who quickly master languages, having mastered Tarascan and Otomí. He uses it for preaching missions, adventurous preaching missions. For this reason, he is picked as the person to pioneer the mission in the northwest, in the province of Sinaloa. He goes there in the late 1580s to Sinaloa and begins a mission there in which he travels quite a bit. By all the contemporary histories is successful, but he’s also extremely confrontational. This is part of what I try to interrogate in the initial chapters of my book, is the hagiography that had celebrated him as a great preacher and eventually as a martyr, someone who had died and sacrificed his life in this cause.

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One thing that I argue is that that’s really ignoring the material causes of why he’s killed in 1594. He is killed, I mean, I agree with what the history say. They say that he’s killed because he’s extricating idolatry. That he’s going town to town and looking at material objects that he deems to be idolatrous, as well as practices that he believes to be pagan, like mitotes or dances in the woods that involve drinking. It’s really this patrolling of material objects, practices like mitote and drinking, and also his patrolling of native sexuality that engenders the resistance of Sinaloa leader named Nacabeba in 1594.

[00:42:00]

Just pointing out A: that their community is suffering under a great amount of epidemic disease, and B: that their freedoms have been substantially curtailed in terms of movement and in terms of practice by the work of Tapia. So he is killed in 1594, and that’s really the starting point of my book, is the Jesuit response to that in which they go and they take the body and regard his body as sacred relics.

Liz Covart:

When we think of Spanish missionaries within the context of really North America, many of us think about the physical missions established by Franciscans and possibly even Jesuits in places like California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida. Brandon, could you tell us about these missions and what role they played, if any role, in the Jesuits’ missionizing work that you just told us about?

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Brandon Bayne:

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Going back to that earlier question about the different religious orders, one thing that happens as you get different religious orders all looking for a vocation and looking for influence, are confrontations amongst religious orders and amongst missionaries for influence. Particularly because the Jesuits gain a lot of influence really quickly, they’re educating the children of the elite, they’re establishing colleges, they are accumulating wealth, there’s a lot of jealousy and particular competition between the Franciscans and the Jesuits. Earlier I said that the pope donates control over different territorial regions to Spain and to Portugal. Most famously, this gets inculcated in the Treaty of Tordesillas where the whole globe is divided. Spain gets the west and Portuguese gets the east.

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There’s a very similar practice within New Spain in which the Franciscans get the east and the Jesuits get the west. That largely runs along the Sierra Madres of western Mexico. So everything east of that is Franciscan, everything west of it is Jesuit territory. That’s why when we look at the US today, the locations you’re citing, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, we think of Franciscan missions. We think about the Alamo and the missions of Texas or the missions that are still there to this day in the Pueblos of New Mexico or San Javier Del Bach in Arizona, those are all Franciscan. Now, what’s interesting and this is counterfactual, is that if you think about California, you also think about Franciscan missions and that doesn’t fit what I just said. Well, that’s because the Jesuits get expelled. By the time the missions are working their way into the western coast of North America, what’s now the United States, the Franciscans take over all the operations of where the Jesuits had previously operated.

Liz Covart:

That sounds like an interesting turn of events. Do we know why the Jesuits were expelled from New Spain and how their expulsion came about?

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Brandon Bayne:

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I’m trying to narrate my book along genealogy of Jesuit work in New Spain, so that does begin in the 1570s and really comes to a conclusion in the 1770s, at least in its first form, about 200 years of work. The reason that it comes to an end was initially the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 from all Spanish held territory. From New Spain, Peru, New Granada, the Philippines. There’s a long process that plays out from 1767 through the early 1770s of you’re imagining really a global enterprise at this point, having to curtail and shrink and be recalled. Many people end up back in Spain, others end up in Italy, in the papal states or in their home countries.

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I mentioned I wanted to talk about two people earlier and I realize I didn’t talk about one of them, Eusebio Kino. He’s a good example of someone who’s not Spanish, he’s from the borderlands of Italy and Austria really. Raised in the tyrol of northern Italy. Kino dies before the expulsion, but German Jesuits end up getting sent back to Austria, to Switzerland, to other German speaking areas.

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The reason it comes about is complicated and it’s because of what we just referenced. The Jesuits are truly a global enterprise, perhaps the first truly global enterprise in the history of the world. And they’re global reasons why they get expelled and ultimately in 1771, suppressed as a religious order, disbanded as a religious order. One of the most well known reasons is the so-called Chinese rites controversy and other controversies in Asia, like the Malabar rites controversy in India, which have to do with what I said earlier, the way in which Jesuits accommodated themselves to local language, culture, and practice, and were accused by Franciscans and Dominicans of really not truly being Christian anymore because they had accommodated themselves to things like ancestral veneration in China. That willingness to adapt to traditional Chinese practice, Franciscans and Dominicans regarded that as religion and a fundamental betrayal of Catholicism. Jesuits saw it as an accommodation. That’s one reason, are the rites controversies in Asia.

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Another reason is what I referenced earlier in terms of jealousy over property and wealth and suspicion that Jesuits in Paraguay in particular had assembled vast amounts of wealth. Where I’m looking, the Jesuits became active in what’s now Baja, California, which was a peninsula, but relatively isolated. They had economic and logistical control over that peninsula. There was a lot of accusation by fellow Catholics and rival groups like the Jansenists in France, that the Jesuits were accumulating large amounts of gold in these areas. Of course, the Jesuits are constantly saying, “No, no, no, we’re poor. We’re poor in suffering.”

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The Chinese rites controversy and suspicion, accusations of Jesuit wealth. The third has to do with internal disputes in France. Of course, France in this period is becoming extremely influential over what happens in Spain and Spanish territories through the Bourbons. Basically the Jesuits fall out of power at the French court and their rival theological group, the Jansenists, used that to really press them to the margins.

Liz Covart:

[00:48:00]

It sounds like there were a lot of politics involved in this decision to expel the Jesuits from New Spain. European politics, Catholic church politics and those geopolitics you just mentioned. What did the expulsion of the Jesuits mean for the Indigenous peoples that they served and interacted with in New Spain?

Brandon Bayne:

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The last full chapter in my book is about the expulsion. The Jesuits who write about the experience of the expulsion, tried to feature the experience of Indigenous people, their former intended converts. From their perspective, it was a disaster for these Indigenous groups because the Jesuits had brought so much cultural resource, had loved them so well that every Indigenous group they represent is sending them off with a teary farewell and sometimes being willing to suffer themselves in revolts and uprisings in central Mexico that accompanied the expulsion. The Jesuits really feature Indigenous communities as grieving, as fellow sufferers, as fellow Christians who have felt betrayed by the expulsion.

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I think we’re only now beginning to pull apart that hagiography. This happens in part through talking. I’m just involved now in talking to leaders in indigenous communities in southern Arizona and in southern California about some of these histories and the way that they think about them. Of course, that’s not the way it’s remembered for many of them. I think for them, they just saw it as continuous, one group of outsiders who were trying to control them spatially and control their bodies, is replaced by another group. I don’t think, at least the way it’s remembered today, that that transition was as dramatic or as long suffering as the Jesuits portray in their histories.

Liz Covart:

[00:50:00]

As you know, Brandon, we Americans often begin our histories of early America by talking about the English or British points of view. Since you’re a scholar who views the same history through Spanish and Indigenous points of view, why do you think these points of view, the Spanish and Indigenous points of view, are really important to include in our investigations and our readings of early American history?

Brandon Bayne:

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That’s such an important question. I did my doctoral work at Harvard with David Hall, who’s a specialist in Puritans, New England Puritans. I began working on New England Puritans and had proposed a project of working on Cotton Mather and Cotton Mather’s Spanish tracks. Mather learned Spanish in a couple weeks and produced a number of Spanish tracks that he sent to Cuba in an attempt, he thought, to evangelize people. He had read Bartolomé de las Casas and believed he was trying to help Indigenous people and others from the Black legend of Spanish cruelty and tried to appeal to them to move towards a pan-Protestant movement.

[00:51:00]

But I got bored with the Puritans, no offense to some who work on that. I’m glad they’re interested in it still, but I got bored after a year or more of that and was always interested in the Spanish world. I had lived in Mexico myself. So I turned to the Jesuits as a way of tapping into that interest. But I was challenged immediately by my advisor and others who said, “With the Puritans, you can take the city on the hill, take the tensions there in that community and play them out and then trace direct lines in the way in which they shaped the English colonies.”

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But I think there’s something to be said, first of all, for what Herbert Bolton said to go back, even though I would very much interrogate the way he represented civilization, the way he occluded Indigenous communities. We are talking about one third of what becomes the United States when we think about the territory surrendered in 1848 as a part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago. In talking about the west and talking about the southwest, these deeper histories are crucial to understanding those regions. As we know, those regions are at the center of so much our national dialogue today, when we talk about the border, when we talk about building the wall.

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For me, it’s important to see the deeper histories of the ways those borders were articulated and it’s interesting to note that the far reaches of the Jesuit mission work in northwestern New Spain really are almost contiguous with the contemporary border. They really weren’t ever able to advance much beyond really Tucson. Even that was a far flung embassy within O’odham territory. I think some of those reasons are geographical. You’ve got the Sonoran desert there, you’ve got the mountains. So there are reasons in which that becomes the thing that they can’t expand beyond for over a century. But it also has to do with Indigenous territorial dominance. It has to do with those communities holding their own and being in place. If we think about a group like the Tohono O’odham today, whose reservation occupies a large portion of the Arizona Sonora border, the US/Mexican border in that area, we’re talking about their deep histories and the ways in which decade after decade, century, after century, they’ve resisted colonizing and settlement by different forms of European settlers.

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Liz Covart:

We should move into the time warp. This is a fun segment of the show where we ask you a hypothetical history question about what might have happened if something had occurred differently, or if someone had acted differently.

[00:53:30]

In your opinion, Brandon, what might have happened if the Spanish crown had not expelled the Jesuits from New Spain in 1767? How might the history of the Americas been different if the Jesuits had continued to be involved in Spain’s colonization project?

Brandon Bayne:

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[00:54:30]

This is a really live and popular question within Mexican historiography, because Jesuits are often portrayed or have been portrayed by some scholars in Mexico as really beginning the process of forming the imagination of a Mexican nation. Part of that argument is that the expulsion itself creates the circumstance in which exiles in Italy and the papal states begin to write histories of Mexico. Some of the earliest histories of a place called Mexico are written by Jesuit exiles, like Francisco Xavier Alegre, who is a Mexican Creole, who then is exiled to Italy and begins to write histories, both of his fellow Jesuits and their missions and of Mexico.

In one way, we might say that Mexican independence might have been substantially delayed and who knows how that would’ve played out because Mexican independence is also tied to Central American independence movements because they were part of New Spain, declared their own independence throughout the 1830s. I think it would radically change the histories of revolution and independence movements in the 19th century.

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But probably getting more to my area of expertise into the northwest, instead of thinking of Junípero Serra and the romanticized Franciscan missions of California, where every California school kid has to do a fourth grade project recreating a Franciscan mission, those would be Jesuit missions. Really, the vision that the Franciscans began to enact beginning in 1768, the year after the expulsion, was the vision of Eusebio Kino who had set out originally in 1683 to evangelize Baja, California then turned to Sonora, the northern parts of Sonora, the area he called the Pimería Alta His vision was always to erect missions up the California coast.

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He was a cartographer, but those were relatively unexplored areas. He thought that those missions would eventually join Alaska and provide a bridge to Japan, to the Asian missions. For someone like himself who had always dreamed of being a missionary to Asia, this was a way of being in New Spain, which he imagined as its own sort of martyrdom, but still accomplishing his dream of helping the missions of Asia. In the late 1690s, early 1700s, had already cast the vision for setting up missions every 20 or so miles up the coast and supplying the Manila galleons these ships that went back and forth from Acapulco to Manila. I think that would change because the Jesuits, I think would have a stronger presence in the American imagination than they do in the way that there’s a romanticization around Franciscan missions in St. Augustine, Florida, or in San Antonio or San Diego, in Santa Barbara. That we would associate, particularly those in the west with the Jesuits.

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I think our universities would look different because if the Jesuits had not been expelled in 1767, then they would not have been suppressed as a religious order in 1771. They basically disappeared for a half century, the people were still alive, but they weren’t Jesuits after 1771. They reconstitute themselves in the 18-teens, 1820s. Then they’re reorganized as the reorganized Jesuits, the second iteration of the Jesuits. When they’re reorganized and return to North America, they have largely abandoned that evangelistic vocation. They’re not focused on the missionary enterprise as much anymore, although certainly were and they were involved in boarding schools and other things in the northwest. But they’re largely focused on institution building and the gift of education.

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Liz Covart:

Well, Brandon, now that you’ve finished your book, Missions Begin with Blood, are you continuing your research with the Jesuits or are you working on something new?

Brandon Bayne:

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[00:58:30]

I mentioned Eusebio Kino a couple of times. He was a missionary that grew up in northern Italy and arrived in 1682 to Mexico City. Inaugurated the mission of the Pimería Alta northern Sonora into what’s now southern Arizona and died in 1711. As I was doing research for this book, he’s a main source and subject in this book. His maps are really what got me going on the book to begin with. Maps martyrdom directly onto the scene and makes a forceful argument in his longer history, Favores Celestiales, the celestial favors, as well as a shorter unpublished book on the life of the martyr Francisco Javier Saeta that missions begin with blood. That’s where that title of the book really comes from, this argument from Kino and some of those fellow Jesuits in the late 1690s, who console themselves with the revolt of the O’odham of 1695, the destruction of churches, the killing of Javier Saeta, with this idea that these revolts and the violence were necessary. That every expansion of Christendom was accompanied by the seed of the martyrs.

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This peculiar paradoxical logic that these were not setbacks, these were not failures, but in fact, suffering led to salvation. That’s part of the argument in this first book. But as I was working on this, I began to work on Kino as a topic of memorialization and he does not die as a martyr, but he imagines himself to be a prolonged martyr or a white martyr. Someone who enacts a lifelong martyrdom of suffering and renunciation. But what’s really interesting about him and the reason I got going on this project, is he becomes a founding father figure to both the Mexican state of Sonora and the US state of Arizona. The US state of Arizona in the 1960s commissions a statue of Kino to represent the state in the US capitol. That project was led by Barry Goldwater. I began working out what was it about Kino that appealed to Barry Goldwater?

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Well, he’s this frontiersman, a rancher and a cattleman who doesn’t always listen to the centralizing authorities in Mexico City. You can see how that began to appeal to libertarian sensibility. The other thing that happens beyond that statue and that’s one of now 19 statues built in honor of Kino. Tracking this advent of monumentation, but the really, I think distinguishing factor with Kino is that the Mexican government orders an anthropology team to search for Kino’s body in the mid 1960s. They believe that they found his body in the town of Magdalena. They dig up the entire town and rebuild it as a neo-colonial Spanish town and build a new plaza. They take what had been a secularized church, because in Mexico in the 1920s and ’30s the Catholic church and the government are at war and the church had been taken over and turned into a union hall. They give it back to the Roman Catholic church and they make it look like it’s 17th century.

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They build a mausoleum over Kino’s grave and it’s through that mausoleum that a number of projects spin out and I become interested in the ways in which a notion of Kino as a civilizer in a so-called savage land and as a pioneer who brings European civilization to what’s supposed to be a place with no civilization, functions to exclude Indigenous people and Mestizo people, Mexican from power in that region. I’m exploring some of the racial politics around memorialization of Kino, looking to also tie that to similar projects in California, around Junípero Serra in Wisconsin with Marquette and Hawaii with Damien of Molokai, and raising this question of how the language of sacrifice being necessary to found civilization carries forward into the 21st century.

Liz Covart:

How can we reach you if we have more questions about the history of New Spain and its missionaries?

Brandon Bayne:

Probably the easiest way is through email. You can find that on my UNC webpage. It’s very easy, B-A-Y-N-E@UNC. I’m also pretty active on Twitter, so you can follow me on Twitter at @Brandonbayne. Be happy to talk with anyone who listens, then gets excited or have something that I could learn from them.

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Liz Covart:

Brandon Bayne, thank you for joining us and for helping us investigate early New Spain and its Jesuit missionaries.

Brandon Bayne:

Thank you, Liz. This has been wonderful.

Liz Covart:

When we investigate the history of early America, it’s really important that we investigate it from many different points of view. Native American points of view, European and European-descended points of view and the viewpoints of African and African-descended peoples. These are the peoples who acted, interacted, and lived in early America, so it’s really important to see early America from these different points of view.

[01:02:30]

Now, our investigation with Brandon allowed us to take a deeper look into the early American past through Spanish eyes. Specifically, through the eyes of Jesuit missionaries who served Spain and its colonial enterprise. Like many members of religious orders, Jesuits took vows of poverty and obedience. They worked toward becoming Catholic priests, and they worked to educate themselves in ways that would be useful to their evangelizing work.

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Now, the story Brandon told us of the Jesuit priest, Gonzalo de Tapia, showed us how Jesuits spent much of their training. Learning different languages, philosophy, mathematics, geography, and theology so that they could interact with those they were trying to convert and teach them the hallmarks of Spanish civilization. We can also see from de Tapia’s story that book education didn’t always help Jesuits on the ground with their work. Although Jesuits desired peaceful relationships with some peoples like the Chinese and others in Asia, they sometimes let their desire for peace be outweighed by their desire to teach Catholicism and impose hallmarks of European civilization on the Indigenous peoples they encountered and interacted with in the Americas. These imposing encounters were often violent, dangerous affairs. Indigenous peoples didn’t want to be told by newly arrived outsiders how they should act, how they should worship and how they should seek husbands and wives and have children, especially by people who took vows of celibacy. In the case of Gonzalo de Tapia, confrontations and interactions over these issues cost him his life when he was murdered by Indigenous peoples who were not open to and resisted his teachings.

I think that’s one universal that we can see in our study of early America regardless of what lens we used to view it. Early America was a violent and contested space. It was a place where many different peoples lived, interacted and vied for control and dominance.

Look for more information about Brandon, his book, Missions Begin with Blood, plus notes and links for everything we talked about today, all in the show notes page, benfranklinsworld.com/334.

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Friends tell friends about their favorite podcasts, so if you enjoy Ben Franklin’s World, please tell your friends and family about it. This episode of Ben Franklin’s World is supported by an American Rescue Plan grant to the Omohundro Institute from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Production assistance for this podcast comes from the Omohundro Institute’s digital audio team; Joseph Adelman, Martha Howard, and Holly White. Breakmaster Cylinder composed our custom theme music. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. To discover and listen to their other podcasts, visit airwavemedia.com.

Finally, what aspects of New Spain would you like to explore next? Let me know, liz@benfranklinsworld.com. Ben Franklin’s World is a production of the Omohundro Institute and is sponsored by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.