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ABSTRACT
This article follows the historical trajectory of the indios de la compañía, a group of Indigenous auxiliaries who performed labor for the Jesuit Order in Chiloé between 1626 and 1767, as a way of exploring place-specific forms of colonial social identity and Indigenous community formation in a borderlands region. The Jesuits held usufruct rights over Indigenous tributaries in Chiloé during 150 years through a series of arrangements that involved the Order, local encomenderos and justices, colonial administrators, and the Real Audiencia of Santiago which, put together, developed a legal custom that underpinned communal viability. This article argues the indios de la compañía constituted an alternative path towards Indigenous community formation in Chiloé, one that was not organized around the local encomienda regime. The absence of particular ethnonyms in this study’s archival base beyond the generic indio/yndio suggests this group’s social identity was not structured around ethnic affiliation, but rather around the specialized forms of labor they performed and the mutual ties of dependence they generated with the Jesuits.
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge the History Department, the Digital Innovation Lab, the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and the Institute for the Study of the Americas—all organizations housed in the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—as well as the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) and the American History Association (AHA) for funding my research. My gratitude goes to José Huenupi from the Archivo Nacional de Chile, Rosario Willumsen from the Archivo del Arzobispado de Santiago, and José Miguel Millán Pascual from the Archivo General de Indias, as well as the rest of the archival staff who helped me carry out my research. A special thank you to Dana Leibsohn, as well as the article’s anonymous readers for working with me through this project’s different iterations, offering constructive criticism, and supporting my research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Piragua is a Taíno word that means canoe. As with other Carib-Taíno words such as cacique, Spaniards used this term as a catch-all to refer to Indigenous canoes throughout the Americas.
2 All translations are the author’s own.
3 During the colonial period, the royal governor of Chile formally unified three positions in his person: gobernador real de Chile, as political and administrative leader; capitán general de Chile, as military commander; and presidente de la Real Audiencia, as chief justice. I will use ‘president of Chile’ throughout this article to prevent confusion with the often-mentioned governor of Chiloé (gobernador de Chiloé), the provincial-level political and military head of Chiloé.
4 For a discussion and schematization of traditional modes and rhythms of subsistence-oriented domestic agricultural production in Chiloé, see Marino Citation1985, 46–72.
5 It is important to note the remarkable spatial stability of the cavíes described in sixteenth-century documents as they transformed into pueblos or capillas—understood not as a town, but rather as a rural sector whose inhabitants made up an encomienda—throughout the colonial period. By the late eighteenth century, the nearly 75 pueblos recorded in censuses bear a striking similarity in their naming and location to the cavíes recorded in mid-sixteenth-century documents (Urbina Burgos Citation2004, 32, 97–118).
6 For a survey of the history of the misión circular in colonial Chiloé, see Moreno Jeria Citation2006; Gutiérrez Citation2007; Urbina Burgos Citation2012, 198–209.
7 Letras annuas desta vice Provincia de Chile del año de 1629 y 30, Gaspar Sobrino, 2 April 1631. Archivo Nacional (AN), Jesuitas, v. 93, f. 16.
8 Memorial pidiendo 40 Indios de Chilue en la Provincia de Chile (hereafter, Memorial), Joseph María, 22 October 1666. AN, Jesuitas, v. 100, f. 179.
9 Memorial, Lorenzo de Arizabalo, 22 October 1666. AN, Jesuitas, v. 100, f. 180.
10 Memorial, Joseph María, 22 October 1666. AN, Jesuitas, v. 100, f. 179.
11 Memorial, Lorenzo de Arizabalo, 22 October 1666. AN, Jesuitas, v. 100, f. 180.
12 Memorial, Joseph María, 22 October 1666. AN, Jesuitas, v. 100, f. 179v.
13 Memorial, Lorenzo de Arizabalo, 22 October 1666. AN, Jesuitas, v. 100, f. 180v.
14 Memorial, Lorenzo de Arizabalo, 22 October 1666. AN, Jesuitas, v. 100, f. 180v.
15 For a study that follows the figure of the fiscales to the present day, see Nahuelanca Muñoz Citation1999.
16 Lorenzo del Castillo al Consejo. 11 October 1721. Archivo del Arzobispado de Santiago (AAS), Fondo Gobierno, v. 19, fs. 86–88.
17 Gobernador de Chiloé respondiendo a la R.C., informa a Su Majestad respecto a la forma de aliviar a las misiones (hereafter, Gobernador de Chiloé), 7 January 1725. Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Chile, v. 105, f. 3.
18 Lorenzo del Castillo al Consejo. 11 October 1721. AAS, Fondo Gobierno, v. 19, fs. 86–87.
19 Gobernador de Chiloé, 7 January 1725, AGI, Chile, v. 105, f. 2.
20 Lorenzo del Castillo al Consejo. 11 October 1721. AAS, Fondo Gobierno, v. 19, f. 87.
21 Gobernador de Chiloé, 7 January 1725, AGI, Chile, v. 105, f. 2v.
22 Gobernador de Chiloé, 7 January 1725, AGI, Chile, v. 105, f. 2v.
23 Lorenzo del Castillo al Consejo. 11 October 1721. AAS, Fondo Gobierno, v. 19, fs. 86–87.
24 Lorenzo del Castillo al Consejo. 11 October 1721. AAS, Fondo Gobierno, v. 19, f. 88.
25 Gobernador de Chiloé, 7 January 1725, AGI, Chile, v. 105, f. 2.
26 Ygnacio de Arcaya al Rey. 12 October 1733. AAS, Fondo Gobierno, v. 19, fs. 102–3.
27 Reclamo de Indios del Colegio de Castro (hereafter, Reclamo). 19 December 1759. AN, Capitanía General (CG), v. 525, f. 249r/v.
28 Reclamo. 19 December 1759. AN, CG, v. 525, f. 249; Moreno Jeria Citation2007, 141–43.
29 Reclamo. 19 December 1759. AN, CG, v. 525, f. 249.
30 Reclamo. 19 December 1759. AN, CG, v. 525, f. 249r/v.
31 For other applications of the concept of a moral economy as described by E. P. Thompson, Karl Polanyi, and James Scott, to a colonial Andean context, see Stavig Citation1988; Larson Citation1998; Serulnikov Citation2003.
32 Reclamo. 19 December 1759. AN, CG, v. 525, f. 249.
33 Reclamo. 19 December 1759. AN, CG, v. 525, f. 251v.
34 The allusions to 1759, and the references the authors make to language included in the complaint analyzed above, suggest the researchers had access to the document I am citing. This was likely to appear in a second part of this study that is hinted at yet was never published.
35 Da parte a Su Excelencia el Señor Gobernador del Puerto de Chilue la falta de atención y menos cortesanía que tiene el R.P.F. Andrés Antonio Martínez, Superior de los Misioneros de Chillán que subredieron a los Jesuitas, Biblioteca Nacional (BN), Manuscritos Medina (MM), v. 306, f. 4.
36 Autos sobre el extrañamiento de los Religiosos Jesuitas de la Provincia de Chiloé (hereafter, Autos), 20 January 1768. AN, Jesuitas, v. 3, f. 225v.
37 Autos, 20 January 1768. AN, Jesuitas, v. 3, f. 186v. The Guaraní missions in Paraguay provide a salient example of the importance attained by Indigenous subjects who oversaw livestock herds in Jesuit holdings (Sarreal Citation2014, 77).
38 Autos, 20 January 1768. AN, Jesuitas, v. 3, f. 186v. Cynthia Radding describes a similar process in the missions of the Chiquitanía whereby Indigenous pueblos in the region came into ownership of livestock herds in ex-Jesuit haciendas and retained them well into the mid-nineteenth century, something that allowed Indigenous communities to retain an important level of autonomy in postcolonial Chiquitos (Citation2005, 288).
39 Autos, 20 January 1768. AN, Jesuitas, v. 3, fs. 212, 232v.
40 Autos, 20 January 1768. AN, Jesuitas, v. 3, f. 230.
41 Representación del cabildo de la ciudad de Santiago de Castro en Chiloé sobre la pobreza y miseria que allí se padece, y vista que sobre el particular dio el protector de indios, 7 September 1766, BN, MM, v. 331, f. 697.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Javier Etchegaray
Javier Etchegaray is a doctoral candidate in the History Department of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research explores Chiloé’s colonial Indigenous communities and his dissertation studies Indigenous participation and self-representation in judicial proceedings as a way of interrogating processes of social identity formation and examining notions about justice, injury, punishment, transgression, and reparation. Javier incorporates GIS methods as a central part of his research and is interested in working with, and teaching, GIS exclusively using open-source datasets and software.