The Bourbon Reforms And The Remaking Of Spanish Frontier Missions

During the eighteenth century the Spanish Bourbon monarchs attempted to transform Spanish America. This study analyses the efforts to transform frontier missions, and the consequences and particularly demographic consequences for the indigenous peoples that lived on the missions.

On June 25, 1767, royal officials in all Spanish territories, including the Americas, began the process of expelling the members of the Society of Jesus. At the time there were some 2,200-2,400 Jesuits in Spanish America, and they staffed urban colegios and frontier missions. This book provides an overview of Jesuit institutions at the time of the expulsion order, their urban role, and the status of frontier missions focusing on the case study of several issues related to the Missions among the Guaraní in South America. This volume contains a visual catalog of historic maps, and historic and contemporary images of selected Jesuit colegios and other urban institutions.

By the early 1700s, the vast scale of the Spanish Empire led crown authorities to rely on local institutions to carry out their political agenda, including religious orders like the Franciscan mission of Santa Rosa de Ocopa in the Peruvian Amazon. This book follows the Ocopa missions through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period marked by events such as the indigenous Juan Santos Atahualpa Rebellion and the 1746 Lima earthquake. Caught between the directives of the Spanish crown and the challenges of missionary work on the Amazon frontier, the missionaries of Ocopa found themselves at the center of a struggle over the nature of colonial governance. Cameron D. Jones reveals the changes that Spain's far-flung empire experienced from borderland Franciscan missions in Peru to the court of the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid, arguing that the Bourbon clerical reforms that broadly sought to bring the empire under greater crown control were shaped in turn by groups throughout the Americas, including Ocopa friars, the Amerindians and Africans in their missions, and bureaucrats in Lima and Madrid. Far from isolated local incidents, Jones argues that these conflicts were representative of the political struggles over clerical reform occurring throughout Spanish America on the eve of independence.

A portrait of the priest and colonialist who is one of the most important figures in California's history In the 1770s, just as Britain's American subjects were freeing themselves from the burdens of colonial rule, Spaniards moved up the California coast to build frontier outposts of empire and church. At the head of this effort was Junípero Serra, an ambitious Franciscan who hoped to convert California Indians to Catholicism and turn them into European-style farmers. For his efforts, he has been beatified by the Catholic Church and widely celebrated as the man who laid the foundation for modern California. But his legacy is divisive. The missions Serra founded would devastate California's Native American population, and much more than his counterparts in colonial America, he remains a contentious and contested figure to this day. Steven W. Hackel's groundbreaking biography, Junípero Serra: California's Founding Father, is the first to remove Serra from the realm of polemic and place him within the currents of history. Born into a poor family on the Spanish island of Mallorca, Serra joined the Franciscan order and rose to prominence as a priest and professor through his feats of devotion and powers of intellect. But he could imagine no greater service to God than converting Indians, and in 1749 he set off for the new world. In Mexico, Serra first worked as a missionary to Indians and as an uncompromising agent of the Inquisition. He then became an itinerant preacher, gaining a reputation as a mesmerizing orator who could inspire, enthrall, and terrify his audiences at will. With a potent blend of Franciscan piety and worldly cunning, he outmaneuvered Spanish royal officials, rival religious orders, and avaricious settlers to establish himself as a peerless frontier administrator. In the culminating years of his life, he extended Spanish dominion north, founding and promoting missions in present-day San Diego, Los Angeles, Monterey, and San Francisco. But even Serra could not overcome the forces massing against him. California's military leaders rarely shared his zeal, Indians often opposed his efforts, and ultimately the missions proved to be cauldrons of disease and discontent. Serra, in his hope to save souls, unwittingly helped bring about the massive decline of California's indigenous population. On the three-hundredth anniversary of Junípero Serra's birth, Hackel's complex, authoritative biography tells the full story of a man whose life and legacies continue to be both celebrated and denounced. Based on exhaustive research and a vivid narrative, this is an essential portrait of America's least understood founder.

Integrating the political and governmental histories of Spain and the American colonies, this book focuses on the political and governmental history of the Viceroyalty of Peru during the 'early Bourbon' period and provides a new interpretation of the period's broader significance within Spanish American history.

"In November 1782, Vicente Gonzales de Santianes, the governor of Nuevo Leon, received a sheaf of documents from a protracted legal dispute in the Indian town of San Miguel de Aguayo. At first glance, the case seems so utterly commonplace as to be beneath the notice of the region's chief magistrate. One of San Miguel's Tlaxcalan stoneworkers had been accused of an adulterous liaison with a townswoman"--Provided by publisher.

This updated edition offers an accessible and richly illustrated study of Mexico's political, social, economic and cultural history.

The years between the accession of the house of Bourbon to the Spanish throne in 1700 and the coronation of Carlos III in 1759 have often been bundled up, and dismissed, together with the later years of Habsburg rule. Growing out of the first Anglophone academic workshop to focus exclusively on Early Bourbon Spanish America, this collective volume gives prominence to the first half of the eighteenth century as a distinct historical period. Discussing from different methodological and geographical perspectives the ways in which the Bourbon succession, international competition over access to Spanish American resources, and war affected the Indies, the contributors examine some of the key changes experienced in Spanish America at the local, provincial and imperial level.