Indigenous Agency and Written Culturein the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay

摘要

Few themes of Latin American colonial history have aroused as much public interest and controversy as the Jesuit missions of Paraguay. From Voltaire’s Candide to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Law, from Lugon’s Christian Communist Republic to the famous film The Mission, the missions have inspired many historical and fictitious narratives, and have polarized opinions and ideologies. While some intellectuals saw the missions as the accomplishment of classical utopias in the South American jungles, others regarded them as a mere chapter of the black legend perpetrated by the Spanish colonizers in the Americas. These writings generally crystallized an image of the missions as an independent state in which indigenous peoples passively accepted the imposition of European civilization’s project. Although scholarship in recent decades has strongly questioned this image, we are far from fully understanding the social and political functioning of the missions during the long period of their existence.