by Marie Arana
But King Carlos listened to the priest, not the Aristotelean. In 1542 the monarch issued the New Laws of the Indies, forbidding all further enslavement in the New World and condemning the encomienda to extinction. The laws had a certain currency in Spain—priests and politicians commended them—and many a Spaniard congratulated the bright-eyed Dominican for the victory. But they had no adherents to speak of in the American colonies. There, every rung of the colonial hierarchy rose up to claim that the laws would undermine their livelihoods: the wealthy would be stripped of their riches; the poor, deprived of the opportunity to become rich. In Mexico, the emissary who was sent to put the king’s laws into effect was eventually persuaded not to publish them at all. In Peru, when the viceroy attempted to enforce the laws, he was pursued, arrested, and beheaded by Francisco Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo. When King Carlos made Las Casas the bishop of Chiapas, which included areas of Guatemala as well as southern Mexico, the municipal council of Guatemala—responsible for a colossal trade in indigo—wrote an urgent, terrified letter to the king, saying, “we are as disturbed as if the public executioner had been sent to cut off our heads.” Even as King Carlos congratulated himself for his enlightened judgment, the priest had become a pariah, and the New Laws were having no effect on the very people they were meant to relieve. These were fleeting victories, worth only the paper on which they were printed. Conquistadors ignored them, landowners laughed them off—finding it easy to scoff at legislation that was signed and stamped thousands of miles away.
In the end, what was a king to do? The debate he had conjured in Valladolid had called into question the very legitimacy of Spain’s rule in the Indies. King Carlos was not about to do what the full logic of his laws demanded: withdraw the abusive conquistadors, surrender his silver to Europe’s circling vultures, and declare the conquest of the New World null and void. The only hope was to hasten the evangelization, make the Indians—and the new generations of mestizos that had been born in the intervening half century—more Catholic, more Spanish. But somehow for the king, the whole question trailed off in a slew of personal misfortunes. His wife had given birth to a stillborn son; two weeks later, she died, leaving him grief stricken, hardly able to function at all. Plagued by epileptic attacks, gout, and an aching jaw, he began to abdicate his empire piece by piece.
When King Carlos relinquished all power and his son, Philip II, took the throne in 1556, the rich conquistadors of Peru, including the silver barons of Potosí, lobbied furiously with the new king to keep their encomiendas into perpetuity so that their considerable wealth could pass down from son to son for the rest of time. They offered him an exorbitant bribe—nine million ducats, which would have paid off Spain’s annual deficit for almost a decade—and Philip was sorely tempted. His father had left him a staggering debt and, traveling to London to wed Queen Mary I of England in hopes of revitalizing England’s Catholic Church, Philip had wildly escalated his prodigal habits. He ordered the Council of the Indies to accept the conquistadors’ offer right away. Las Casas, who had been battling to abolish the system of encomiendas, was outraged when he heard of it. The hyperindustrious priest set about persuading his allies as well as Peru’s Indians to match the sum with a counteroffer, which they did, however empty the gesture might have seemed.
But eventually the Spanish colonial bureaucracy brought the whole business to a grinding halt. Peru’s first conquistadors were ensured their riches into perpetuity, a few of the landowners were allowed to retain theirs during their lifetimes, and the rest had to revert all property to the Crown. The descendants of the Incas, who had struggled beneath the colonial boot for more than a generation now, were given little hope that their progeny would ever escape the cycle of exploitation. “We who were once brave and noble,” one lamented, “are no more than pitiful servants now, yanakunas.” So it was that the business of righting wrongs with the Indians was left entirely to a growing circle of mendicant priests, pledged to poverty, who knew all too well that the mission to evangelize had not fared well in Cortés’s and Pizarro’s hands. For all the bellowing of saints’ names as the conquistadors had charged into villages—for all the planting of crosses atop the sacred huacas—the sword was never going to bring the Indians to Jesus.
A MISSIONARY’S WORK
With the faith, the scourge of God came into the country.
—Jesuit Relations, 1653
Bringing the Indians to Jesus was much on Xavier Albó’s mind as he made his way through the two-year novitiate. It seemed to him that a missionary’s work should be the other way around: Shouldn’t a priest be bringing himself to the Indians? Wasn’t a missionary’s work to serve rather than to impose? He couldn’t shake the thought that an entire mythology of inferiority had been inflicted on the race he had been sent to engage. The psychological offensive was still at work, fruit of a deep racial bigotry. Somewhere along the way, the assumption had been made that to truly conquer, a victor needed to disgrace and demoralize, make his subject believe in his own worthlessness. As one angry priest had shouted at his congregation five hundred years before: if the indigenous were a beleaguered, exhausted race, perhaps it was because their conquerors had not been practitioners of true Christian grace. “What care have you ever given to revealing God the creator in a way that they might understand the logic of baptism, of hearing mass, of consecrating holy days in His name?” the man had said. “Perhaps you think they are devoid of rational souls? Are you not obliged as Christians to love them as you love yourself?”
Xavier believed without a doubt that the Bolivian Indians he had come to know—the meek as well as the bold—often had higher spiritual capacities, sharper intelligences, and more natural abilities than their white masters recognized. But they’d had scant opportunities to flourish.
He became acutely aware that he was entering a cleft society, an apartheid nation. The whites and near-whites in the cities, all Spanish speakers, were thriving. The Indians and darker citizens in the countryside, the Quechua speakers, were desperately poor. The bilingual mestizos in the cities often hid their fluency in Quechua, ashamed to claim their indigenous roots. A sharp racial and linguistic divide separated the two Bolivias, and the composite wasn’t working well. There was much a fledgling priest might do for the 62 percent pushed into the margins: the miners who needed justice, the campesinos who needed education, the mothers who needed relief, the children who needed doctors, the villages that needed water. Who was going to meet those needs if not the servants of God? Governments seemed to have abdicated all responsibility.
Arriving a few months after the agrarian revolution, Xavier could not have known about Bolivia’s upheavals, its devastating losses to Paraguay in the Chaco War (1932–1935), or its new Socialist president, but he could sense an air of possibility in those who made the bread, swept the roads, tended the pigs. Cloistered from the world at large, without the benefit of any orientation or access to newspapers, he had to gather evidence from what he could see. Could it be that the country was poised on the brink of change? It was a daring thought, but Xavier imagined himself nudging that process along, winning the poor some measure of dignity, doing work that could truly be called Christian. To that end, he decided to commit himself body and soul to learning Quechua, the ancient language of the Andes. Even as he studied the fundamental lessons of priesthood, he pored over the caprices of Quechua grammar, its chip-chop phonology, its singular world view. By the time two years were done, the spiritual exercises of Jesuit founder Saint Ignatius learned, his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience taken, and his novitiate over, he had a solid, working knowledge of the tongue.
Albó had a talent for languages, and his Jesuit teachers were keenly aware of it. Over the years, he had acquired a rudimentary command of Latin, French, Italian, English. At ease in the world—an outgoing boy with an impish streak, a frank tongue, and an adventurous heart—languages came easily to him. It was the liturgical curriculum, the rigors of history and philosophy, that required appl
ication. And yet for all the intensity of the classroom and imposed insularity of his group, he managed to have moments of collegial joy. His fellow novitiates were Catalan and Bolivian youths—the Catalans, from families of modest means; the Bolivians, from families with lavish haciendas. There was a spirited boy from Barcelona who had joined the Society of Jesus in order to travel the world; in time, he would leave the order to marry a Bolivian woman. There was the elegant Bolivian from an illustrious mining family, a descendant of the millionaire moguls of Potosí, whose Quechua was perfectly fluent because he had been raised by an Indian nanny. The teachers were no less fascinating—the old Jesuit astronomer, for instance, who stored his lenses in toilet paper tubes, fussed over celestial maps, and stared into the night sky, never quite trusting that scientists understood that radiant splendor. There were the taciturn serranos, mountain people who came and went, doubting the claims that Bolivia was entering a better world—they had heard it all too many times before. There were the señoras in wide skirts and bowler hats who sold chicha, chatted with Xavier amiably, and giggled when he made mistakes and unwittingly uttered salty language. His love for Bolivians came in such fleeting glimpses; it was electrifying, profound, immediate. He never lost the feeling that Bolivia was the land he had been destined to embrace; the Indians, his true people.
After two years, the Jesuit missions decided to send him to Ecuador for the next step in his formation. Understanding that surrender itself was part of a priest’s curriculum, Xavier serenely gathered up his few worldly possessions—a scattering of clothes, a family prayerbook, a stack of notebooks with rows and rows of notations in a tidy hand—and boarded a puffing, squealing iron behemoth bound for Quito. He did not know it yet, but the pages tucked under his arm represented the rudiments of his first book, a Quechua primer.
Ecuador surprised him: a twentieth-century nation locked in a time warp, its collective head immersed in the colonial past. Seeing Indians in and around Quito confined to lives of servitude and hard labor, he began to understand the revolution that was taking place in Bolivia. Quechua was Ecuador’s language, too, a lingua franca throughout these parts, given that the Inca Empire had exercised a long reach and an abiding grip. But the Inca pluck, that essential pride, that singular pundonor—to never lie, never steal, never be idle—had all but drained from the indigenous here. They didn’t seem to know the inherent spirit they might reignite, the age-old power they had lost. All the same, Xavier continued his linguistic work, seeking out those who might teach him more, befriending the random passerby who might add to his mounting fluency. As he met more people—the rich along with the poor—he never lost the feeling that he was abroad in a land of the cowed: human casualties of five hundred years of domination. Traveling down the coast to Piura and Lima, he found the same doomed resignation in the indigenous and mixed-race cholos of Peru.
His observations couldn’t have been more accurate. Ecuador, like Peru, was in the midst of a stern political backlash in the 1950s. The Communist wave that had swept the hemisphere had found a stunning corrective in both countries: in Ecuador, President José María Velasco had imposed a strict reactionary agenda; in Peru, General Manuel Odría was conducting an all-out military campaign against anyone who questioned the legitimacy of white rule. Indeed, throughout Latin America, a fierce campaign to stamp out Communism was afoot, supported by the United States and bolstered mightily by the ruling white Creole class. Xavier may have arrived at a transformative time for Bolivia, but the old-style oppression was all too evident in Bolivia’s neighbors. From 1950 to 1966, fourteen governments were violently overthrown as dictatorial rule was forced on more than half of Latin America’s population. Intrigued by the struggle between Right and Left—the haves and have-nots—Xavier began a systematic study of the philosophy of Latin American revolutionaries, particularly the founder of the Ecuadoran Communist Party, Manuel Agustín Aguirre. Unlike the priests who had marched with conquistadors, he found himself aligning with those who had no power at all. Nor was this unusual for a “soldier of God.” The Jesuits had a long history of bucking power in Latin America.
As a neophyte, Xavier now entered the next stage of the fifteen years he would dedicate to preparing to serve the Society of Jesus. He would spend three years in Quito, studying philosophy, metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, epistemology—all in Latin. A few of the subjects—physics, for example, or the history of philosophy—which required a deeper comprehension or a more ample canvas for argument, would be conducted in Spanish. If the education of a Jesuit was considered the most stringent in the Catholic clergy, there was a reason why. Its contours had been established four centuries earlier by the soldier Ignatius of Loyola—Basque founder of the “soldiers of God”—and little had changed since its inception.
Even as Columbus was scouring the Caribbean, hunting slaves, Ignatius had been at war in Europe, serving in Ferdinand and Isabella’s army. Wounded when a cannonball shattered his legs, the nobleman was sent home to his estate in Loyola, where he experienced a vision that called him to religious life. That vision, embraced by the pope and seconded by the Spanish Crown, was to create an army of tough Christians, men prepared in the rigors of every academic discipline so that they might be sent anywhere in the world, ready to spread the word of Christ in the most Spartan of conditions. The training would be long and arduous, meant to test the loyalty, resilience, ingenuity, and endurance of any would-be warrior. Ignatius’s idea couldn’t have come at a more propitious time for Spain. There was a New World to Christianize, and militant Christians were needed to bring a hemisphere of Indians to heel.
But the Jesuits often found themselves warring on the side of the Indians. In the late sixteenth century, almost exactly four hundred years before Xavier pledged himself to the order, an eleven-year-old boy in the tiny Spanish town of Medina had taken the Jesuit pledge, eventually joining its forces in Peru and Mexico. He was José de Acosta, a liberal-minded priest who refused to accept that indigenous religions were little more than barbarian devil worship. Acosta argued that Indians inhabited another world of thought and knew God by the light of natural reason. He was vehemently opposed to the clean-slate strategy of Christianization, evangelism as practiced by conquistadors: the notion that you could win souls by smashing idols and razing temples, baptism by blood and fire. “To eradicate idolatry by force before Indians have spontaneously received the Gospel,” he claimed, “has always seemed to me, as it has to other very wise and sober men, to close, lock and bar the door of the Gospel to those outside, rather than open it.” Acosta wanted Jesuits to take a different tack: evangelize little by little, not by leaps and bounds but by small steps, gathering Indians together, learning from them, spreading the word of God by example. To that end, he established schools and universities for the native population throughout Peru, much to the consternation of the viceroy.
Throughout the 1500s and 1600s, Jesuits who hewed to Acosta’s principles organized vast, economically successful reducciones—isolated settlements—of Indians in the Andes, Brazil, and the vast territory that reached from Argentina to Peru, known as Paraguay. The Crown approved heartily, on the assumption that these far-flung communities would hold Spain’s frontiers against Portuguese expansion. The Jesuits, on the other hand, assumed these remote settlements would keep tribes safe and offer them full, productive lives, apart from the spoliations of colonial rule. The missions became sanctuaries from conquest, havens where priests operated as entrepreneurs, overseeing vast fields of corn or cotton, ranches of pigs and cattle; where the Guaraní or the Yaqui or the Amazon tribes learned to read books and play music; where they learned to worship the Christian God; where they could be safe from the marauding Portuguese paramilitaries—the bandeirantes—and their brutal slave raids. In the immense territory that surrounds the Río de la Plata, by the end of the seventeenth century, more than half the Indian population lived and worked on Jesuit lands.
But too much success proved to be the Jesuits’ undoing.
Over the course of 150 years, their missions became such thriving businesses that the Crown decided they were a competing economy—a state within a state—that needed to be stopped, ejected from the Americas entirely. On February 27, 1767, King Carlos III expelled the Jesuits from all Spanish territories. Priests were swiftly summoned to ports, herded on ships, sent home. Their buildings were confiscated, their settlements stripped of all possessions, their ranks interrogated for any property they still might hold. Eventually the pope declared the Society of Jesus “forever extinguished and silenced.” Thousands of destitute priests—instantly transformed into pariahs—roamed Europe seeking refuge. The Indians who had inhabited their reductions in the wilds of South and Central America dispersed into jungle and mountain, dazed, disoriented, left to the caprices of circumstance. Many were prey to slavers and lubricious landlords who swept in to raid the missions and take advantage of the governing void. Whole populations were abducted and sold into the Brazilian slave markets. Corpses hung from trees in the missions. Many Indians simply slipped into the rain forests and disappeared. The violins, the flutes, the books, the libraries, the plows were all tossed into ovens, cooked down, and made into gunpowder cartridges. Those who persevered and remained, hoping for miraculous regeneration, grew ill, dying in far greater numbers than births could replace them.
