Impacts and legacies of migration across the Pan Amazon

By theamericannews
2 hours Ago

Although represented by only a few thousand people across 150 years, the Jesuits left a major social and cultural impact on native communities across the Pan Amazon. Their aim was to create autonomous communities based on early Renaissance concepts of equality and a spiritual vision based on the Christian Gospels. But in practice, they worked closely for the political and military interests of the colonies.Jesuits settled in remote places and border areas after being invited by colonial authorities interested in taking advantage of the native population’s labor force. But their arrival triggered the collapse of the Indigenous populations of the Western Amazon. Only in the late 17th century, more than 140,000 people died because of diseases brought by the outsiders.The success of the Jesuits and the religious colonialism that characterized the Catholic Church in the 17th century motivated other religious orders to follow similar missionary programs.

See All Key Ideas

Most of the Pan Amazonian population consists of immigrants or their descendants. They arrived over centuries, motivated by historical events that moulded their self-identity. This diverse assemblage of people represents a broad range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, which is further stratified by economic opportunity – or the lack thereof.

Immigration into the Amazon followed routes that were determined by proximity and access, first via the river network and then by highways that were constructed specifically to facilitate colonization. The differences amongst the groups are reflected in their production systems, which explain, in part, why the different regions of the Amazon have followed distinct development trajectories.

The first wave: Jesuits versus bandeirantes

The first European explorers of the Amazon were soon followed by missionaries affiliated with the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as Jesuits. Although few in number, probably fewer less than 3,000 individuals over 150 years of mission activity, they had a massive impact on the cultural and political history of the Pan Amazon. Nominally non-state actors, these highly educated clerics played an important role in stabilizing the frontier zones that separated the Spanish and Portuguese empires.

The Jesuits deliberately founded outposts in remote landscapes as part of their evangelical mission to convert native populations. Isolation, however, also allowed them to pursue their philosophical agenda free from the interference of colonial power. Their approach relied on innovative tactics, such as preaching in the native language, but their goal was also novel: to create autonomous communities based on early Renaissance concepts of equality and a spiritual vision based on the Christian Gospels.

In the northeast, Jesuits based in Quito accessed the Western Amazon via the Río Napo, a route originally pioneered by the Spaniard Francisco Orellana in 1540, which was followed in reverse by Pedro Teixeira in 1637. The Jesuits soon discovered alternative routes to the Río Marañón via the Santiago and Pastaza rivers, which they used after being invited into the region by colonial authorities who were seeking an another means of harnessing the labor of native populations. Undoubtedly, the arrival of Teixeira and his reported territorial claim reinforced the strategic imperative of establishing Spanish sovereignty in the hinterlands of South America.

Samuel Fritz produced the first relatively accurate map of the main channel of the Amazon River when he traveled from Jaén (Peru) to Belém (Brazil) in 1689. Father Fritz founded dozens of missions among the Omaguas and served as Jesuit superior of Maynas between 1701 and 1710 (Days 2012). Image location: Library of Congress.

The first mission was established in 1640 at a military post (San Francisco de Borja) near the junction of the Marañon and Santiago rivers. From the Misión de Maynas, named after an extinct Indigenous tribe, the Jesuits sought converts from numerous ethnic groups, including the Jivaroan peoples (Shuar, Achuar, Huambisa and Aguaruna), the Omagua (Kambeba) and Kokoma (Kukama-Kukamiria). At their greatest extent, the missions established by the Jesuits from Quito stretched into the Solimões section of the Amazon River, with outposts at Coari and Tefé in what is now Amazonas state.

This was the period when Portuguese slavers, known as bandeirantes, preyed on Indigenous communities on the banks of the Amazon River and its tributaries. These raids became so frequent that many native inhabitants sought refuge in the missions, which had organized Indigenous militias. The Jesuits preached a philosophy of peaceful coexistence among their congregants, many of whom belonged to mutually antagonistic warlike tribes; nonetheless, they were not unwilling to use force to further their own objectives. The militias were more than a self-defense force and were primarily used to forcefully recruit converts among forest-dwelling natives.

The settlements, known as reducciones because they concentrated dispersed rural populations, were controlled by a Jesuit priest in the role of a benevolent autocrat. The number of mission outposts varied, reaching a maximum of about 75 before a demographic collapse triggered by a smallpox epidemic in 1666. They expanded after 1690 because of the arrival of a highly motivated class of Jesuits, and again in 1750 when the Jesuits reinforced their presence near the mouth of the Río Napo following the signing of the Treaty of Madrid, which recognized the principal of uti possidetis, the priority of possession when determining sovereign borders. One of those settlements eventually developed into the regional capital of Iquitos, which was considered a counterweight to the Portuguese mission and military post at Tabatinga.

Ironically, this evangelical effort, which was designed to protect Indigenous people, triggered the collapse of the Indigenous populations of the Western Amazon. In 1660, Maynas was home to about 200,000 individuals, about half of whom lived in the missions. The Jesuits reported the death of 80,000 natives in 1666 and 60,000 in 1681; thousands more perished in the epidemics of 1749, 1756 and 1762. When the reign of the Jesuits ended in 1767, there were only 25 active missions with about 14,000 residents.

The Jesuits were also active on the Portuguese side of the colonial frontier. Their activities are less well known, however, because they were eclipsed by the actions of colonial authorities and bandeirantes. While the Jesuits in Maynas organized their utopian society in the absence of the state, the Portuguese Jesuits shared the geographic space with the military, as it established a network of forts across the region. Military, civil and religious activities were all managed from Belem, which was founded in 1616, and later from a fort established in 1666 at the junction of the Solimões and Rio Negro, which eventually grew into the city of Manaus.

San Francisco Javier de los Piñocas (San Javier, Santa Cruz, Bolivia) was founded in 1691 as part of the Chiquitos Reductions (today Chiquitanía). The Jesuits forced the various tribes to cohabit in missionary outposts, resulting in a unique hybrid indigenous culture underlying a strong vocation to the Catholic faith. Image © Shutterstock.

Despite their less prominent role, the Portuguese Jesuits had a similarly large impact on the Indigenous nations of the Amazon. Their presence began when a charismatic priest, Luís Figueira, convinced the royal government to support the creation of a network of missions within the colonial jurisdiction of the Estado do Maranhão. Starting in 1639, they created autonomous villages (aldeias) while promoting a policy referred to as liberdade dos indígenas.

Although the concept of liberty was essentially limited to a status of non-slavery that was contingent on a regime of Jesuit autocracy, it conflicted with the ambitions of the bandeirantes and civil authorities, who viewed Indigenous populations as a source of slave labor. The missions pursued two objectives: providing a refuge for Indigenous people and demonstrating an alternative economic model that was more palatable to their supporters within the Portuguese Court.

As in Maynas, the Jesuits compelled multiple different ethnic groups to cohabit in mission settlements, where they were schooled in a common language, known as Língua Geral, a simplified dialect of Tupi-Guaraní that modern linguists refer to as Nheengatú. Agriculture, presumably on black earth soils, provided workers and patrons with essential foodstuffs, but revenues were derived from the commercialization of forest products collectively known as the drogas do sertão. On Marajó Island, the Jesuits laid claim to vast natural savannas and introduced cattle, the first in the Amazon, for the production of hides, tallow and dried beef. The herd of more than 200,000 head of cattle was their most economically valuable asset and among the first to be seized by colonial authorities.

The success of the Jesuits, and the religious colonialism that characterized the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century, motivated other religious orders to pursue similar missionary programs, which led to a competition for souls amongst the monastic orders. In 1693, King Pedro II restricted the Jesuits’ evangelical activities to the south bank of Amazon River and its associated tributaries; simultaneously, he granted the Carmelites, Mercedarians and Franciscans domain over missions in the northern half of his Amazonian territories.

The Carmelites were the most consequential, because they assumed responsibility for a string of missions on the Rio Negro and Rio Branco, which established Portuguese sovereignty on the frontier lands adjacent to the Spanish Empire’s Viceroyalty of New Granada, today Colombia and Venezuela.

As in Maynas, the Indigenous communities suffered from wave after wave of infectious diseases; at least one-third of the population died on the Solimões in 1647 and a similar proportion on the upper Rio Negro in 1740. These losses were aggravated in the Portuguese Amazon by the bandeirantes, whose business model depended upon capturing or buying Indigenous people for transport to the lower Amazon, referred to as ‘descents’, for sale to colonists establishing agrarian enterprises in Maranhão. Despite the tensions between the Jesuits and the colonial actors, they coexisted until 1750, when the religious orders were ordered to surrender the economic component of their missions to colonial authorities. In 1759, the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal and all of its colonies.

The first Jesuit mission in the province of Maynas was established at a military post near the confluence of the Marañón and Santiago rivers in 1637. Over the next 130 years, more than 150 missions or reductions were established, although only 33 were active at the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish colonies in 1768 (Negro- Tua 2013). In the Portuguese territory of Grão Pará, the Jesuits established dozens of missions during the 17th century, but those north of the river were transferred to other clerical orders in 1693 as a strategy of the crown to limit the secular power of the Jesuits, who were expelled from Portuguese territories in 1759. The reductions in what is now Bolivia were administratively linked to the Jesuit province of Asunción (Paraguay), and were organized into two groups: (a) Moxos, in the flooded savannas associated with the Mamoré River, and (b) Chiquitos, in the seasonal forest and savannas of the Cerrado at the headwaters of the Guaporé River. Data sources: Saito (2015) and Groesbeck (2018).

In the Southwest Amazon, Jesuits based in what is now Paraguay established two clusters of missions: Chiquitos, in the seasonal forests on the Brazilian Shield (Santa Cruz, Bolivia), and Moxos, in the vast inundated savannas in the upper watershed of the Rio Madeira (Beni, Bolivia). As in Maynas, they were characterized by their isolation and their ability to organize multiethnic, self-sufficient agrarian societies.

The Jesuits explored the Llanos de Moxos and its Indigenous people starting in the 1670s, and the first permanent settlement was established in 1682 at Loreto, on the Río Mamoré, a tributary of the Madeira situated about 200 kilometers north of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Subsequently, they established mission outposts downstream on the Mamoré, followed by others on the western edge of the inundated savannas, which created a link to the colonial authorities in Peru (1683–1700). A second phase expanded into the savannas south of the Guapore River (1700–1715) demonstrating again the geopolitical calculations that motivated the actions of the Spanish Jesuits.

As in all of the reducciones, natives were both forcefully inducted and enticed into the settlements, which by 1736 encompassed 24 missions with a population of 37,000. A typical settlement cultivated cassava, maize, sugar cane, cocoa, cotton, rice and coffee, while housing workshops were dedicated to iron work, carpentry, weaving and tannery, as well as warehouses, a sawmill and slaughterhouse. The Moxos was particularly renowned for its cotton cloth and a livestock herd that numbered 50,000 cattle and 27,000 horses in 1767.

Missions were designed to manage the annual floods that characterize the Llanos de Moxos, but they were periodically beset by catastrophic floods that triggered epidemics of dysentery in the sedentary villages. Even more serious were one smallpox epidemic in 1731, presumably triggered by the clergy themselves, and another in 1763, caused by the arrival of Spanish troops sent to counterbalance incursions by Portuguese bandeirantes. Diseases reduced the population to fewer than 19,000 when the Jesuits were expelled from the region in 1767.

After the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Chiquitanos were enslaved by secular authorities who imposed a feudal labor model centered on the latifundia. Image courtesy of the History Museum, Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René Moreno.

The ten Chiquitos missions established between 1691 and 1760 were among the most successful of the Jesuit reducciones. At their peak, they were home to between 20,000 and 40,000 congregants. As in the other missions, different ethnic groups cohabited in villages and spoke a universal version of Guaraní to communicate. The Chiquitos missions were all associated with natural (Cerrado) grassland, which supported 32,000 cattle and 800 horses. Each village was self-sufficient and capable of producing a surplus for trade with the outside world.

The Chiquitos missions were established in a region with no navigable rivers; consequently, they communicated with the outside world using horses and oxen. Despite their isolation, they were still exposed to attacks by bandeirantes and were equally distrustful of their Spanish allies in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, who had a history of conducting ethnic warfare, as well as a proclivity for exploiting the labor of Indigenous people. Self-defense forces protected their residents and provided a coercive tool for attracting new congregants.

Fortunately, the climatic and cultural conditions in Chiquitos, now known as Chiquitania, preserved much of the architectural and artistic legacy of the Jesuit period. Jesuits, then as now, embraced education as a vocation; consequently, they tended to be competent administrators and had technical skills or were proficient in the arts. Many hailed from the Hapsburg territories of Central Europe and were among some of the most enlightened individuals in the Catholic Church.

The residents of Chiquitos and Moxos maintained their identity as Indigenous people. Rather than identifying with a specific linguistic or ethnic group, however, they assumed a composite identity that reflected their shared Jesuit past. Known as Chiquitanos and Moxeños, they speak Spanish and are among the most numerous Indigenous peoples in the Amazon.

Banner image: The construction of the Estrada de Ferro Madeira-Mamoré (EFMM) was emblematic of the migration phenomenon during the first rubber boom. Controlled by an American businessman (Percival Farquhar), the company hired skilled and unskilled workers from all over the world. Credit: Courtesy Dana B. Merrill Collection, Paulista Museum.

“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).

To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.