In Service of Two Masters: The Missionaries of Ocopa, Indigenous Resistance, and Spanish Governance in Bourbon Peru

By Cameron D. Jones

By the early 1700s, the vast scale of the Spanish Empire led crown authorities to rely on local institutions to carry out their political agenda, including religious orders like the Franciscan mission of Santa Rosa de Ocopa in the Peruvian Amazon. This book follows the Ocopa missions through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period marked by events such as the indigenous Juan Santos Atahualpa Rebellion and the 1746 Lima earthquake. Caught between the directives of the Spanish crown and the challenges of missionary work on the Amazon frontier, the missionaries of Ocopa found themselves at the center of a struggle over the nature of colonial governance.

Cameron D. Jones reveals the changes that Spain's far-flung empire experienced from borderland Franciscan missions in Peru to the court of the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid, arguing that the Bourbon clerical reforms that broadly sought to bring the empire under greater crown control were shaped in turn by groups throughout the Americas, including Ocopa friars, the Amerindians and Africans in their missions, and bureaucrats in Lima and Madrid. Far from isolated local incidents, Jones argues that these conflicts were representative of the political struggles over clerical reform occurring throughout Spanish America on the eve of independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781503608382

Cameron D. Jones

Cameron D. Jones is an award-winning author whose publications include In Service of Two Masters: The Missionaries of Ocopa, Indigenous Resistance, and Spanish Governance in Bourbon Peru. He teaches at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California.

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Introduction

The greatest desire of our sovereign in the expansion of these domains has been the conversion of the infidel Indians to reduce them into the flock of the Church.

—Manuel de Amat y Junient, Memoria de gobierno, 1776

Frontier missions were a critical component of Spain’s imperial enterprise in the eighteenth century. These missions mediated between the crown’s desire to exploit the wealth of the indigenous peoples and the natives’ desire for autonomy. In previous centuries, these frontier areas had served principally as buffer zones between areas of Hispanic cultural diffusion and hegemony and the sparsely populated hinterland beyond. In these borderlands, semi-sedentary indigenous groups accepted and resisted attempts by Catholic missionaries to convert them and control them in networks of mission villages, demonstrating the resiliency of both groups. By the end of the seventeenth century, many areas in the borderlands had reached a dynamic equilibrium, because religious institutions lacked the resources to force more resistant ethnic groups onto their missions. The absence of a large, exploitable pool of laborers or substantial mineral deposits made crown officials and merchants unwilling to invest in further expansions into the hinterland. By the eighteenth century, this paradigm began to shift, as other European powers exerted their influence in the Atlantic world. Spanish officials became more interested in developing their American frontiers, not just commercially but as buffer zones against foreign intrusion into territory they claimed. This brought them into contact with indigenous groups who had been spared the initial burdens of Spanish colonization.

Into this milieu came the missionaries of Santa Rosa de Ocopa.¹ In 1709, a reform movement within the Franciscan order, called the Apostolic Institute, sent half a dozen missionaries to Peru to strengthen and expand evangelization into the eastern tropical forestlands. Between 1709 and 1824, the Ocopa missionaries built an impressive network of missions throughout the Peruvian Amazon region and in southern Chile. At its height in 1802, at least in theory, the Ocopa college presided over an area of South America roughly the size of France.

During their 115-year history under Spanish rule, Ocopa missionaries interacted with numerous indigenous nations throughout the tropical forests along the eastern slopes of the Andes. These included the Asháninkas, Yaneshas, Nomatsiguengas, Piros, Cashibos, Shipibos, Conibos, Cholónes, and Hibitos (as well as the Chonos and Huiliches in southern Chile). Most of these groups had been spared Spain’s initial wave of colonization (and perhaps more important, epidemic disease) and used accommodation, flight, and often rebellion to negotiate varying levels of autonomy against the impositions of missionaries. Even at the height of their power, the Ocopa missionaries lacked the resources to dominate these populations, but neither could these indigenous groups, even after, in some cases, expelling the missionaries, ignore their influence. The result was an uncomfortable accommodation that in many ways mirrored internal conflicts that existed throughout Spanish America, but which were more apparent in the frontier, far from the veneer of colonial authority.

Spanish Governance, the Bourbon Reforms, and Ocopa

Spanish America was a vast and complex space developed over centuries of negotiations with local political actors. The Habsburg dynasty that ruled Spain from 1517 to 1700 practiced a form of governance later dubbed a composite monarchy, in which they respected the laws and even common practices of the various polities ruled by the monarchy.² The Americas, though an appendage of the kingdom of Castile, had their own laws, called collectively el derecho indiano. Even in the eighteenth century, official correspondence could spend nearly a year in transit between Madrid and Lima. To reach the missions of Ocopa from Lima could take another four months. In addition to geographic obstacles, the American landscape was a variegated patchwork of languages and cultures not clearly understood by many colonial administrators back in Spain, some of whom had never traveled to the New World. Such a complicated cultural mixture combined with the slow dissemination of information made rapid reactions from the metropolis to emerging situations difficult. Thus, crown authorities had to rely on local political actors to sort out local problems, particularly in frontier areas.

Although some of these local actors were crown officials, most were not, and they included local commercial interests, city councils, indigenous groups, freed and enslaved blacks, and religious institutions. All fell within a spectrum between accepting and rejecting Spanish authority; but one of the principal components that helped to maintain Spanish control were relatively loyal, nonstate institutions, such as the clergy. It was these semi-independent yet hispanicizing groups that in many ways mediated between local desires and crown interests. Though by 1700 this system had made governance in Spanish America increasingly unwieldy, it made the empire resilient to external pressures. Spain’s involvement in the unending European conflicts and waning financial and political power, however, caused ties with its many territories to strain, particularly those outside continental Europe. The loosening bonds with its colonial masters created in many places in Spanish America a veritable colonial Golden Age, but, as more of the continent’s wealth remained in local hands, from an imperial perspective something had to change.³

To reform Spain’s decaying political system, many of the new Bourbon ministers turned to the example of France, which was the originator of the dynasty as well as the predominant European political power of the day. During most of the second half of the seventeenth century, under its Sun King Louis XIV, France had pursued an agenda of monarchical consolidation of state power, expressed best by one of Louis’s most famous supposed utterances, L’État c’est moi (I am the State). France’s reforms were part of a longer trend of state centralization in Europe stretching as far back as the Middle Ages, but by the eighteenth century this process was aided by the emerging European Enlightenment. Enlightened political thinkers began to question traditional methods of governance and sought to remove the inefficiencies of the old systems. This questioning of the political status quo led some philosophers to advocate republicanism or even democracy, and others championed a new, more extreme form of regalism. These new regalists believed that, as Louis was attempting to do in France, all political power should be centralized in the institution of the monarchy. They sometimes even referred to their monarchies as absolute, a concept derived from Roman law that absolved sovereigns from being subject to their own laws. In Spain, Bourbon regalist philosophy easily took root since, despite the challenges of ruling over such vast territories, Spain already had a long history of strong monarchical authority.⁴

To implement this regalist vision, royal ministers attempted to wrest power away from any institution that rivaled crown authority. Of particular interest to Bourbon reformers was the Catholic Church. The Church had been the crown’s traditional partner in the governance of its many realms. Indeed, in a practical sense the Spanish Church functioned as an arm of the government. This was in part due to the patronato real, or royal patronage, which allowed the Catholic kings of Spain to nominate candidates for bishops within its territories and to control the tithe.⁵ This authority over episcopal appointments gave the crown great influence over the principal hierarchy of the Church, which included archbishops, bishops, and parish priests, known as the secular clergy. As Spain began the spiritual conquest of the Americas, however, large numbers of regular clergy traveled to the Americas. Regular clergy are men and women who follow a particular religious rule, or regula. In the Americas, these were mostly Franciscans, Mercedarians, Augustinians, Dominicans, and later Jesuits. Regular orders, with their zeal, internal organization, and discipline, contributed much to early colonization efforts. Consequently, the crown allowed the regular clergy to fulfill many of the duties normally reserved for the secular clergy, such as operating rural indigenous parishes.⁶

Although the regular clergy helped evangelize much of the New World, their presence created a dilemma for the monarchy. Except in regards to permissions to perform sacraments, regular religious orders were supranational organizations whose members answered not to local bishops but to their own leaders in Rome. These leaders, in turn, were ultimately accountable to the pope. Furthermore, for those clergy who ministered in faraway Spanish America, even Rome’s authority was limited. Long distances made effective coordination difficult and left local provincial leaders with considerable autonomy.⁷ As early as the reign of Philip II (r. 1556–98) in the late sixteenth century, the influence of the regular clergy had impeded crown efforts to extend royal power over the Church in the Americas.⁸ As Bourbon government ministers began to advance regalist policies in the eighteenth century, the conflict over the king’s inability to control the regular clergy in the Americas escalated. One of the more extreme regalist ministers quipped in 1765 that, from the moment they [took] vows, [regular clergy] should be looked upon as foreigners.⁹

Regular clergy, according to regalist ministers, also stood in the way of the other principal aim of the reforms, the rehabilitation of the economy of the Spanish empire. Over the centuries, devout Catholics had donated money and large tracts of land to the clergy in both Spain and the Americas. Convents and monasteries used these resources to maintain themselves. During the eighteenth century, however, royal officials began to believe that the Church’s hold on these vast resources adversely affected commerce throughout the empire. They argued that, if Church property could be put in the hands of commercial interests, it would be used more efficiently and create tax revenue. Though the Spanish crown already received a percentage of Church tithes, many in the royal government saw greater potential revenue in the sale of Church property. Some ministers even began to argue that monastic life removed too many individuals from the workforce, thereby damaging the economy. Convents and monasteries labored to worship God; they did not, ministers argued, help to further industry within the empire. Moreover, because of their vows of celibacy, regular clergy had no children and thus reduced the workforce of the next generation.¹⁰

In attacking the Church, royal officials had to tread lightly. Most were (or at least claimed to be) devout Catholics, and because the king’s power derived from divine attribution they had to be careful in attacking God’s servants on earth. Indeed, though these reforms were intended to weaken the political power of the Church, most reformers did not see their actions as anticlerical or antireligious. They understood that the clergy were an integral part of the Spanish empire. As the influential Italian regalist Ludovico Antonio Muratori stated in 1749, the state would be strong if "perfect and constant harmony [existed] between the Sacerdocio [clergy] and the Imperio [state], and if both [strove] together to deliver the people spiritual and temporal happiness."¹¹ Many royal ministers engaged in reform believed that by removing clerics from political power they would be allowing the clergy to focus on their principal duty, saving people’s souls.

Ocopa, therefore, presented a difficult case to those in government trying to enact reform. On the one hand, to reformers they were ideal clerics. They were disciplined, considered more loyal since the majority were Spanish-born, and did not try to stunt productivity or soak up capital by maintaining large urban monasteries. Instead, they went out into the frontier to expand Spanish dominance through evangelization, potentially opening new lucrative markets. If the crown hoped to control frontier areas more effectively, they needed groups like Ocopa. On the other hand, Ocopa had become a powerful institution, wielding political influence locally, regionally, and across the Atlantic. Reformers struggled to decide how to approach the Ocopa missionaries; was it best to curtail their rising influence, or to aid them in their endeavors? Not surprisingly, over its 115-year colonial history Ocopa experienced often ambivalent treatment from reformist royal ministers.

These shifting and contradictory stances toward Ocopa demonstrate the importance of individuals and small groups both within and outside the Spanish bureaucracy in creating the changes experienced in the Spanish empire throughout the Bourbon period (1700–1824). Ocopa’s interactions with the crown exposed many of the fissures between interested groups within the Spanish bureaucracy. Ocopa’s history demonstrates how both the terms and the implementation of the so-called Bourbon reforms were negotiated at all levels of society among the indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans in the missions, the missionaries themselves, local government officials in and around the College of Ocopa and its missions, the viceregal seat in Lima, and the court in Madrid. Indeed, although these historical actors were indelibly influenced by ideas circulating around the Atlantic world, such as Enlightenment-inspired regalism, it was individuals’ interpretations of those ideas that ultimately decided how events in the missions and throughout the Spanish empire unfolded. If the many royal ministers wanted to increase royal authority throughout the empire, it was with this reality that they had to contend.

Historical Trends in Mission History and the Bourbon Period

Over the past few decades, the scholarly field of mission history has seen a dramatic shift in focus and tone. Most of this dynamism is due to the emergence of what has been called New Mission History in the 1990s. Though some excellent studies on missions preceded this period, all too many were simply triumphal Eurocentric accounts authored principally by the clergy themselves. In contrast, New Mission scholars argued for refocusing the field of mission history on the indigenous peoples and provided invaluable ethnohistorical information about the indigenous groups in the frontiers of the Spanish empire. The best of these works include Cynthia Radding’s Wandering Peoples and Susan Deeds’s Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North. Both works examine identity and cultural resistance among native groups in northern Mexico.¹² This ethnohistorical approach still has an important presence in the field, as exemplified by Steven Hackel’s 2010 edited volume on the California missions titled Alta California.¹³ Many of these works are masterpieces of historical interpretation and research, though in their difficult quest to uncover information on previously unstudied, often undocumented groups they have often given insufficient attention to the missionaries who interacted with them.

There are many noteworthy exceptions to more recent indigenous-focused mission histories. Most prominent, David Weber’s 2005 Bárbaros examines the motivations of various political and religious actors for attempting to civilize the Spanish American frontiers during the Bourbon period. He argues that previous historians have oversimplified Spanish behavior in the frontier, in many cases overlooking their Enlightenment-inspired desire for economic exploitation of the native population.¹⁴ Similarly, David Block’s 1994 Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon envisions frontier Jesuit missions among Moxo people in northern Bolivia as institutions with concrete political, economic, and social goals created by the intersection of missionary teachings, government policies, and local customs. Dealing in a later period, Erick Langer’s 2009 monograph Expecting Pearls from an Elm Tree also explores the effects of the changing intellectual and political climates on frontier mission areas. He demonstrates how political shifts between liberal and conservative governments in nineteenth-century Bolivia shaped the cultural, political, and commercial interactions between missionaries and indigenous peoples.¹⁵ In a similar vein to these works, this book looks to understand the wider political and intellectual context of the Ocopa missionaries’ activities in the eastern Peruvian jungle. It is by no means an attempt to minimize or belittle the ethnohistorical approaches, or any studies focused on the indigenous inhabitants of the region. Quite the opposite, it seeks to be a companion to such works.

Even during the colonial period, the Ocopa missionaries obsessively wrote their own history. In most cases, these histories were persuasive devices designed to extract concessions of funds and land from the crown. Foremost among these is the chronicle written in the 1770s by José Amich, titled Compendio Histórico de las conversiones de estas Montañas de Perú (Historical compendium of the conversions of these jungles of Peru). As would be expected, Compendio Histórico painted the missionaries of Ocopa as pious emissaries sent to bring the word of God to the infidels of the eastern Peruvian jungle. The work downplayed any deleterious effects of any actual reforms emanating from Madrid but was critical of several colonial officials’ actions regarding the missionaries, particularly the failure of Peruvian viceroys to provide money and material promised to Ocopa by the crown. Amich’s account became the basis for most of the later works on the Ocopa college by Franciscan historians. It was expanded in the early twentieth century by Ocopa missionaries Fernando Pallarés and Vicente Calvo to include a narrative of the history of the institution up until 1907.¹⁶ Even into the 1920s, historians relied almost completely on Amich’s account. Bernardino Izaguirre’s 1929 Historia de las misiones franciscanas (History of the Franciscan missions) quotes Amich extensively.¹⁷

A significant change occurred in the historiography of Ocopa with the rise of Indigenismo, a revisionist movement in the 1920s and 1930s that attempted to glorify Peru’s indigenous past. With this movement, most works began to focus not on missionaries’ pious works, as the Franciscan histories had, but on the struggles of the indigenous populations who lived in the missions. In particular, historians turned to the most remarkable event of Ocopa’s history, the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion. In 1942, José Loayza published a collection of documents related to the rebellion, Juan Santos, el invincible. In the introduction and footnotes to the volume, Loayza characterized the Ocopa missionaries as simply appendages of the state who blindly adhered to the Spanish colonial project. This conflation of all Spaniards into one homogeneous group was important to his overall nationalist commentary in the footnotes that accompany the documents. Loayza contended that the rebellion was a precursor to the creole-led independence movement of the 1820s. Steve Stern’s 1987 article The Age of Andean Insurrection, 1742–1782 more correctly places Juan Santos in its larger context of the indigenous-led, anticolonial revolts of the late Bourbon period.¹⁸ In his attempt to construct a Marxist dialectic between oppressors and the oppressed, however, Stern still overlooks the nuances of the missionaries’ place within the colonial regime.

The most comprehensive works on the Ocopa missions have tended toward ethnographic examination of the peoples encountered by the missionaries. Jay Lehnertz’s 1974 dissertation, Lands of the Infidels, looked at the indigenous groups in most of the regions evangelized by the Ocopa missionaries. Lehnertz’s work, unfortunately, was preliminary, without the benefit of having been refined for publication, and tended toward a conclusion that missionaries had little impact on the societies they encountered—a conclusion that later ethnohistorians and anthropologists would contradict.¹⁹ Indeed, some of the best work that has been done on the area evangelized by Ocopa, particularly the Peruvian central high jungle, or central Montaña, has come from anthropologists. Stefano Varese’s Salt of the Mountains looks at one of the most prominent ethnic groups that Ocopa missionaries attempted to evangelize during their early expansion (1709–42), the Asháninkas. Though Varese’s work is based on fieldwork done in the 1960s, he contextualizes the Asháninkas’ cultural resilience to outside impositions within a long history of resistance that began with the missionizing efforts of Ocopa.²⁰ Fernando Santos-Granero has published several articles on the interaction of the Ocopa missionaries with the peoples of the Peruvian central Montaña, culminating in the book Selva Central, coauthored with Frederica Barclay. Again, like Varese’s, this book details some of Ocopa’s history and discusses the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion, but it focuses primarily on modern ethnic, political, and economic concerns in the region.²¹

Only one work thus far has attempted to place Ocopa in the larger political context of the Bourbon reforms. Pilar García Jordan’s Frustrada Reconquista de la Amazona Andina (1742–1821) (The frustrated reconquest of the Andean Amazon) argues that, despite the Spanish crown’s lackluster response to the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion, it was greatly interested for geopolitical reasons in the development of the Peruvian jungle frontier zone. Ocopa worked hand-in-hand with the crown to achieve that goal but ultimately failed because of infighting within the Franciscan order over the establishment of a Catholic diocese in the Peruvian jungle (the diocese of Maynas). This article is, however, preliminary and based solely on published sources, principally the relations of the viceroys, and tends to overlook the tension and animosities between the missionaries and viceregal government. These conflicts formed part of the larger debates circulating in the Spanish Atlantic as part of the reform process.

The historiography of the Bourbon reforms in Spanish America has focused on a series of related questions: To what extent did the reforms affect Spanish America? If affected, what were the mechanisms of change? Who was involved in the process?²² Early works on the subject saw the Bourbon reforms as a top-down process, executed by peninsular bureaucrats. John Lynch, in his 1973 classic synthesis of the Spanish American revolutions, called the reforms the new imperialism and the second conquest of America. Shortly thereafter, historians began to question this paradigm. As John Fisher queried in 1982: Did [the Bourbon reforms] really comprise the smooth, coherent masterly program of imperial change and revival that generations of commentators, from the very imperial policymakers of eighteenth-century Spain to the researchers of today, have identified? Might they not be more realistically depicted in terms of halting, uncertain, inconsistent desire for imperial modernization and centralization, characterized more by delay, contradiction, and obstruction than by decisiveness?²³

Fisher’s doubts were soon supported by several studies, especially those by Allan J. Kuethe and Jacques Barbier, which showed the reforms to be not only halting, uncertain, [and] inconsistent but very much a reaction to circumstances both economic and military on the ground and therefore varied by region.²⁴ More recently, Barbara and Stanley Stein, in the second volume of a trilogy on the Bourbon period, Apogee of Empire, have questioned whether the reforms, even at their height, were ever an attempt at a profound structural change to Spain’s empire, or simply calibrated adjustments to maintain the exploitative colonial system.²⁵

To evaluate the efficacy of the Bourbon reforms, many historians have turned to examining their financial impact, particularly in regard to royal revenue. Increasing remittances to Spain was one of the reformers’ principal goals and can be seen as indicative of the crown’s ability to increase its control over its American possessions. Like the reforms themselves, the results of these studies are much debated and contradictory. Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe argue that reforms failed to revitalize royal revenue for the metropolis. Instead, they argue, the money was simply redistributed throughout the empire from economically robust regions like New Spain to declining regions like Cuba. This system of intercolonial dependency demonstrated the reformers’ inability to fundamentally change the colonial system, which needed local elites to function. Irigoin and Grafe refer to the resulting accommodation as a bargained absolutism.²⁶ Rafael Torres Sánchez, however, in an exhaustive study of the General Treasury of Madrid, has shown that there existed a steady flow of income into the royal coffers, particularly from New Spain, which could have enabled the government to maintain its reform agenda during the height of the reform period (1759–88).²⁷ Furthermore, James Mahoney, in a study of the transition between the colonial and independence eras, argues that the Bourbon reforms had a deep impact on the socioeconomic development of Spanish America and formed an essential factor in determining the differing economic trajectories of post-independence nations.²⁸ Though it is not the principal focus of this study, I indeed show the importance of increasing royal revenue and commerce to the reform process and demonstrate how concern for royal coffers affected government ministers’ stances toward Ocopa.

Most recently, Kenneth Andrien and Allen Kuethe, in The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century, have tried to forge an interpretative middle path between the extremes of Bourbon reforms as a second conquest of Spanish America and as bargained absolutism. Although reformers wanted to enact reform, they argue, these new policies conflicted with local political actors, viceregal officials, clergymen, and even subaltern groups in the various far-flung regions of the empire, leading to heterogeneous results throughout the whole of Spain’s possessions. These fights were in turn complicated by dynastic desires for military expansion, which could accelerate or retard individual aspects of the reformist agenda.

The present volume attempts to expose debates of the Bourbon reforms at all levels of the social, political, and economic spectrum through the narrative of the missionaries of Ocopa. I borrow from a conceptualization of the Atlantic world pioneered by African historian Joseph C. Miller. Miller argues that the Atlantic world should not be conceived as a few discrete hierarchical empires managed effectively by European monarchies. Instead, it should be seen as numerous smaller autonomous communities engaged in multiple, mutually reconstituting encounters, which allowed them to find new places in emerging cultural contexts of their own creation. Therefore, although no one group could completely drive the course of events, every group held enough political, economic, and cultural influence to inhibit the autonomous initiatives of the others while pursuing its own discreet agenda.²⁹

The Ocopa missionaries, then, were just one of many groups in the crucible of the empire, vying for political and economic power and autonomy. Though they believed themselves to be loyal subjects of the king, they did not function simply as agents of the government sent to extract local resources or manpower for Spain; they had their own spiritual and temporal objectives. They wanted to create a spiritual utopia, as they envisioned it, sustained with state funds but free from crown interference. Crown officials, though, had other objectives. In the eighteenth century these included the consolidation of royal authority and an increase in revenue. This vision was made even more complicated by fissures within Ocopa and the Spanish bureaucracy, as smaller factions of ministers and missionaries alike acted upon and enacted policies differently, according to their individual interpretations of regalism and Enlightenment ideals. In addition, indigenous ethnic groups and enslaved Africans residing in the missions reacted diversely to the historical processes happening around them and exerted their own influence on events. What happened in the missions was the result of the interactions between the different participants, each with its own discrete agenda. This complex negotiation of political power and cultural space dominated all interactions in the Americas. The narrative of the New World, therefore, cannot be summarized in terms of European interests in conflict with indigenous peoples, or competition between different European empires, but in a complex series of compromises among various and sometimes mixed groups of Africans, Europeans, and native peoples.

Organization of the Book

This book is divided into six principal chapters. Chapter 1 examines the first three decades of the Apostolic Institute’s presence in Peru. In addition to looking at the establishment of the missionaries’ permanent base at Ocopa, it tracks the rapid installation of two dozen mission stations in the Jauja, Tarma, and Huánuco frontiers. As part of this narrative, the chapter delves briefly into ethnohistory to illuminate the missionaries’ difficulties with converting the local populace. It explores the friars’ initial attempts to culturally assimilate the natives of the region into mission life and how and why these ethnic groups resisted their efforts, sometimes violently. At the same time, it looks at Ocopa’s emerging relationship with the Spanish colonial bureaucracy at its various levels. Though Ocopa initially received promises of funding from the crown, a series of increasingly regalist viceroys refused to fund the group consistently. The ultimate goal of the chapter is to show how these early failures to aid Ocopa’s evangelization efforts, combined with indigenous resistance to the missionaries’ political, economic, and cultural impositions, led to instability in the missions, which was easily exploited by Juan Santos leading up to the rebellion in 1742.

Chapter 2 focuses on the events surrounding the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion. Specifically, it examines how the viceregal government ultimately failed to support Ocopa against the rebels. The first part of the chapter looks at why different and sometimes competing indigenous groups joined Juan Santos, a mestizo from the Andean highlands, against the missionaries. It narrates the initial expulsion and murder of Ocopa friars and the unsuccessful attempt by local militia to end the rebellion quickly. The chapter then looks at the larger geopolitical context of the rebellion, examining how the Lima earthquake and tsunami ultimately shaped the viceroy’s decision to abandon attempts to dislodge Juan Santos from Ocopa’s missions. At the same time, it uncovers the role that Ocopa’s support for one of its former missionaries, Friar Calixto, played in kindling the viceroy’s animosity toward the college. It ultimately argues that the viceroy ordered military efforts against Juan Santos abandoned, not because of strategic concerns but to limit the influence of Ocopa, which he saw as a threat to royal authority.

Chapter 3 in part continues chapter 2 by examining the aftermath of the viceroy’s decision to cede most of Ocopa’s missions to the Juan Santos Atahualpa rebels. The first part of the chapter looks at Ocopa’s lobbying campaign in Madrid to force the viceregal government to commit enough supplies and manpower to expel Juan Santos. The missionaries’ reputation for piety and obedience convinced crown officials to grant Ocopa essentially all its demands. But the viceroy refused to honor the crown’s decree, remaining intransigent on the Juan Santos question, and instead halved the missionaries’ stipend. This was motivated in part by the missionaries’ continued support for Friar Calixto, whom the viceroy had arrested and forcibly removed to Spain for his alleged complicity in fomenting indigenous unrest against the government. Ultimately the viceregal government relented on the issue of the college’s annual stipend, but it continued to hold Spanish forces in a defensive position