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Content Enable editor Use plain text Code entry ...Ricard... grouped 16th-century missions into three categories. "Missions of occupation" were characterized by a dense network of convents grouped around a center. "Missions of liaison" were strings of convents belonging to a single order, spaced to function as hostels. "Missions of penetration," sporadic and impermanent, were located in places made difficult by topography, climate, or hostile natives. These were throwbacks to the conquest and were found only on the frontiers. Other institutions that survived on the peripheries of empire were the religious entradas, or friars' reconnaissance expeditions, and the "misiones volantes," or "flying missions." The basic unit of "fixed" as opposed to "flying" evangelization was the doctrina, which originated alongside the encomienda. Polzer divided the process of frontier evangelism into four stages. During the presencia stage, contact took the form of an entrada or an outpost. The object of presencia was to gain an invitation to begin conversions; to that end the friars and their backers offered the natives material benefits and military alliances. After the Indians agreed to accept a missionary, evangelism entered the brief stage of conversion, or conversion viva. As soon as conversion showed signs of permanence, it proceeded to the phase of doctrina, a kind of preparochial grace period during which the neophytes, or catechumens, were exempt from civil and ecclesiastical taxes and their ministers were free from the investigations and claims of bishops. Intended to last no longer than ten years, the doctrina phase, for various reasons, was often extended. The final phase, parroquia, or parish, was reached when the Indians, well advanced in the arts of civilization, entered the ranks of native Christians and subjects ready to support the diocese with their tithes and the central government with their tributes. An Indian congregation metamorphosed into an Indian parish when it was secularized, that is, subordinated to the nearest diocese. At this point, the doctrinero appointed by the order was supposed to retire from the scene to be replaced by a cura, or beneficed secular priest, who was appointed by the bishop and remitted a quarter of his income from sacramental fees to the diocese. Here, however, the process broke down. Whether it was because few members of the secular clergy came forward to spend their lives on poor and perilous frontiers, or because the semisedentary denizens of the frontiers took longer than the imperial peoples to acquire the characteristics of Spanish civility, or because the orders had reasons of their own for retaining control of their converts, the replacement of regular with secular clergy was deferred, and the doctrineros' temporary assignments became converted into entitlements. The result in many places was an enclave of natives in a state of perpetual minority under the guardianship of a standing doctrinero from one of the religious orders. This doctrina, developmentally stunted and segregated from the outside world, is the "mission" of most historians, who tend to apply the term to any native frontier community or compound under the wardship of one of the missionary orders. For George Kubler, this definition of the mission as "a Christian congregation, permanently housed near a church built by the natives in a land beyond the jurisdiction of any bishop," and "an ecclesiastical outpost . . . constituting an economic unit capable of supporting itself and its spiritual head by means of its own resources and labor" obscures the mission' s interesting variety (Kubler, 1983: 369). In 1795, Diego Miguel Bringas, a product of the Franciscan missionary college of Queretaro, 1 made an attempt to clarify evangelical procedures for the king by associating "the care of souls," that is, Indian souls, with three institutions. "Misiones, reducciones, and conversiones," he explained, were "essentially the same institution," dedicated to propagating the faith. "Completely different from each other as well as from the former," the two institutions in which the faith was preserved were the doctrina and the curato, the main difference between the two being that the doctrina could not support a ministro but had to be provided with one by royal patronage. Each of these three institution corresponded to "a specific spiritual condition": the mission/reduction/conversion to the "pagan," the doctrina to the "new Christian," and the curato to the "Catholic instructed in the qualities of a good vassal who is useful to church and state." As Father Bringas's first category shows, contemporaries overlaid the terms for spiritual conquest -"mision" and "conversion" -with parallel terms for directed settlement- "poblacion," "congregacion," and "reduccion." The first one, poblacion, signified the process of populating new territory, often by having trustworthy Christian Indians move in to found new pueblos, or poblaciones. The Crown encouraged Indian pobladores, as it did espanol settlers, with ten-year tax exemptions and outright subsidies. The second type of directed settlement, congregacion, involved collecting the inhabitants of remote or depopulated settlements into fewer, more accessible, aggregate settlements called congregaciones. Although the Spanish encouraged, directed, and took credit for the amalgamation process, it could happen with or without their initiative... a similar aggregation occurred in southeastern North America, as a consequence of the 16th-century population crash, in societies that lay within the range of Old World pathogens but were as yet beyond the pale of Spanish influence. The third type, reduccion, was roughly equivalent to congregacion except when the term was applied to the nomadic or semisedentary people who did not naturally live "politicamente," or in polities. When "wild people" accepted fixed settlement and the constraints of municipal government they were said to be ''reduced" to "pueblosenforma." Here again, the settlement process and the resulting settlement carried the same name. A reduccion... is "an incipient community where the Indians have been gathered together for more efficient and effective administration, both spiritual and temporal," as they "learn the rudiments of Christian belief and the elementary forms of Spanish social and political organization." No Spaniard other than a missionary was supposed to reside in a reduccion. All three types of directed settlement lent themselves to social engineering, paternalism, and racial segregation. The 16th-century Christian humanist Vasco de Quiroga applied Sir Thomas More's blueprint for Utopia to communities in Michoacan for 20 years. Geronimo de Mendieta, 16th-century Franciscan missionary to New Spain, advocated a system of segregated republics-the Republic of Indians and the Republic of Spaniards, each having its own language-that foreshadowed the isolationist Siete Misiones of the Platine river system. The Jesuits modelled their 17th- and 18th-century absolutist reductions in Paraguay, Brazil, and Baja California after the pre-Columbian Incaic community as they understood it. In 1769, two years after the Jesuit Order was expelled from New Spain, Franciscan missionaries extended the reduction model into Alta California, where it lasted until the secularization of the missions in 1834, sufficiently different from its predecessors that Charles Polzer could argue that the California mission was "post-typical" and represented "a total shift in Spain's cultural policy in the Americas." ... It is often assumed that any native community having a member of the regular clergy for a priest would remain under wardship indefinitely, subject to the beneficent governance of the missionary order. Although in several comers of the New World missionaries did keep their charges in the conversion stage, segregated from settlers and soldiers, exempt from taxes, and subject to a godly authoritarianism in their temporal as well as spiritual lives, this kind of paternalism was by no means universal. More commonly, the conversion progressed to the next stage and bogged down there. The "evolved doctrina," as distinguished from the "encomienda-doctrina," was... ''half-mission" and "half-secular parish or curacy." On the one hand, the doctrinas came under the patronato real. They enjoyed no temporal authority. Some bishop was entitled to visit them, examine their priests, and receive a share of their tithes. On the other hand, the doctrineros were appointed by their own superiors and the royal treasury covered their stipends. Had the secularization of the doctrinas resulted in a wholesale replacement of ministers, Bringas's doctrinas would have evolved into curatos, but that replacement did not occur. In the minds of most people, a "curacy" with a priest from the regular clergy instead of a proper "cura" from the secular clergy was a contradiction in terms. Canonic technicalities aside, Indian parishes continued to be called doctrinas and parish priests from the teaching orders, doctrineros. (Bushnell SS)

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