Oriol Ambrogio Gali is a research fellow at the University of Nottingham. His latest book Indigenous Sacraments: Christian Rituals and Local Responses at the Fringes of Spanish America, 1529–1800 was published by Nebraska in December.

Indigenous Sacraments provides the first study of Indigenous perceptions of the Christian sacraments at the fringes of colonial Spanish America, particularly in the missions established by the Jesuits in northwestern Mexico, central southern Chile, and the Gran Chaco. After Jesuit missionaries arrived in these regions between the end of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, their sacraments came to control every rite of passage, from birth to reaching adulthood to the formation of new families to death. Through the administration of the sacraments, missionaries intended to replace extant Indigenous habits and beliefs with Christian values.

Oriol Ambrogio Gali draws on a range of diverse sources to explore the changing attitudes toward the sacraments and to highlight the cultural and religious evolution of the Indigenous groups living at the fringes of Spanish America. By exploring local perceptions of the Christian sacraments, Ambrogio Gali shows that Indigenous peoples were far from static recipients of Christianity in the Americas.

Introduction

As readers delve into the numerous Jesuit accounts written on the evangelization of the fringes of Spanish America, they become aware of the harsh reality missionaries experienced while introducing the sacraments to the Indigenous groups. Missionary records tell of Indigenous individuals running away from the priests or attempting their lives, trying to avert the administration of the sacraments. They tell of dissimulation in confession, rejection of monogamy, improper uses of baptismal water, and desecrations of the Eucharistic host. Along with reporting indigenous skepticism, fear, indifference, and outright refusal of the Christian sacraments, sources highlight the slow and gradual acceptance, adaptation, and radical change of these new rituals. It becomes evident that the history of the introduction of sacraments is the backbone of the process of Christianization and that it highlights both its successes and failures.

This book is a history of missionary sacramental administration and Indigenous peoples’ perceptions of the Christian sacraments at the fringes of colonial Spanish America. I examine the social and religious impact of four sacraments (baptism, penance, marriage, and the Eucharist) on the Indigenous populations of northwestern Mexico, central-southern Chile, and the Gran Chaco, beginning with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors and Jesuit missionaries in the second half of the sixteenth century and ending with the Jesuit expulsion from Spanish America in 1767. The Indigenous groups of these regions shared a common history of opposition to the conquest, contesting the Spanish military and religious expansion through violent uprisings, geographical dispersion, and passive resistance. The three regions studied were remote areas far away from the imperial centers that became sites of persistent Indigenous military and cultural resistance. Here, the Spaniards did not manage to establish a dominion based on a permanent urban structure, road connections, a stable military control, and a pervasive presence of the religious authorities. In addition, the local inhabitants of these areas managed to maintain a condition of almost total independence and sovereignty for long periods, even centuries.

The vast majority of the Indigenous populations of northwestern Mexico, central-southern Chile, and the Chaco first encountered the Christian sacraments at the hands of the Jesuits. Moreover, although they were anticipated in some areas by the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Mercedarians, the Jesuits were the only missionaries operating with continuity in the areas analyzed, which allows a long-term study of the impact of evangelization on populations living at the fringes. The great geographical dispersion of the Indigenous populations encountered and the difficulty in reducing the locals into villages for the purpose of conversion forced the Jesuits to develop a different methodology based on the concept that local groups would need more than the statutory ten-year period to become full-fledged Christians and parishioners under the administration of secular priests. The different conditions of the fringes forced the Jesuits to act with caution, and the missionary personnel soon realized that Christianity at the fringes had to proceed slowly and gradually. Although the locals responded in different ways to the arrival of Christianity, they shared a general skepticism and indifference toward the Christian rituals, frequently perceived as intrusive instruments promoted by ambiguous ritual specialists. At the same time, Indigenous neophytes gradually learned how to cope with the novelties of Christianity and how they could assimilate the sacraments into the extant cultural and religious systems.

In writing this book, I intend to enhance historical understanding of the missionary enterprise in the colonial Americas and foreground Indigenous agency by giving a new centrality to the study of the Christian sacraments. Essential elements of everyday missionary life, the seven Christian sacraments (baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, the last rites, holy orders, and marriage) ritually controlled every rite of passage, from birth to reaching the age of an adult to the formation of new families to death. The sacraments are outward signs of inward divine grace; they are deemed to be instituted by God for the sanctification of Christians. That is, the sacraments are external and visible ceremonies, which include specific words and actions that grant grace to men and women.

The existing scholarship on the religious encounters between Europeans and Indigenous populations has largely overlooked the importance of the sacraments in the processes of evangelization. Some works have concentrated on the missionary sacramental administration and especially on the theological debates raised by the local groups’ access to the sacraments. Others focused on one or few sacraments in a specific region and time. Despite their significant contributions to the study of missionary methodology, these works do not tackle the Indigenous peoples’ perceptions of the sacrament and their cultural and social impact on local communities. This book breaks new ground by considering, through the lenses of Jesuit writers, the ways the Indigenous peoples perceived the sacraments, why they refused or accepted their introduction, how they accessed such rituals, how the sacraments reshaped the local communities, and, finally, how they performed and transformed the sacraments. By focusing on the local groups’ perceptions of the sacraments, this book offers a history of Indigenous peoples’ agency, of their religious and cultural actions as a response to the introduction of Christianity. It is a history of the forms of power that Indigenous individuals still possessed to control or at least to influence as much as possible the events of their daily lives inside the context of the missions. Reinterpreting and bending the Christian religious novelties to the advantage of the locals represented systems of defense, strategies of political and cultural interaction and negotiation with the conquerors, and means to understand the new reality of the postconquest world.

This book claims that participation in the sacraments did not necessarily mean that Indigenous individuals were partaking in and sharing the values and precepts of the missionaries. However, the way the sacraments were perceived, appropriated, and adapted to the local circumstances shows Indigenous peoples’ perception and evolving idea of Christianity and its rituals. The changing attitudes toward the sacraments highlight as well the cultural and religious evolution of the Indigenous groups living at the fringes. Under missionary rule, sacraments changed, at least in the minds and practices of local groups, from rituals reflecting the teachings of the missionaries to new acts that attempted to conciliate the religious contrasts triggered by the conquest.

This book also contributes to ongoing debates on the theme of religious conversion. The very word conversion has been recently rejected by several historians who consider the term as too representative of a missionary mind-set and suggest instead the use of terms such as syncretism, hybridity, affiliation, appropriation, and practice to better represent indigenous groups’ interactions with Christianity. This book distances itself from the concept of conversion for other reasons. Conversion implies an internal religious change, by which a nonbeliever accepts the values of a new religion and redefines his or her personal experience in the light of such transformation. In the absence of sources written by Indigenous groups who could highlight such process, it is impossible to trace the existence of an internal religious conversion among the groups studied. Therefore, this book argues that the acceptance of baptism or the frequent participation in other sacraments are not sufficient to indicate an internal conversion. Therefore, the term conversion is not used throughout the text and is substituted with the more neutral acceptance and refusal of the Christian rituals. By showing how Indigenous groups carefully negotiated with the missionaries the introduction of Christianity and accepted or refused the religious novelties according to the extant local customs, this book shows that locals approached novel religious experiences in a practical way. Religious motivations only rarely guided local decisions regarding the acceptance of the missionary rule.

In addition, this book contributes to a long-running but not very prominent conversation about comparative borderlands in the Latin American world by comparing three vast areas that have been only partially studied by the extant literature. A comparative study of the fringes illuminates the faltering results of the military and spiritual conquest and shows how the dynamics of interaction between missionaries and Indigenous individuals could differ from those established in urban sites and in the Spanish colonial towns. In regions where the missionaries represented a clear minority and were rarely supported by the presence of military garrisons, coercion as a pastoral method was rarely used, as it would have been useless and counterproductive. Missionaries developed pastoral strategies based on the exclusive use of local languages and a gradual introduction of the sacraments. Well aware of the difficulties to diffuse the sacraments, the evangelizers at the fringes had to patiently introduce elements that could attract the locals and only in a second stage dealt with the most delicate issues. This resulted in a continuous attempt to adapt Christian rules to the local situation, even though that process obviously depended upon the different nature of every individual and ultimately had to respect essential Christian principles. The comparative study of the fringes shows that the search for an accommodation of the Christian precepts proceeded along with the parallel development of unique local forms to deal with the missionary rule and the subsequent creation of a syncretic cultural and religious system.