In 1709, members of a reformist branch of the Franciscans known as the Apostolic Institute arrived in the hot jungle valleys along the eastern slope of the Andes to extend Spanish dominion and convert Amerindians. Over more than 100 years, the college of Santa Rosa de Ocopa and its missionaries were integral to the crown's attempts to consolidate authority in Peru's montaña. As a special “institute” of predominantly Spanish friars, new to the Americas and reliant on Spain for financial support, the Ocopa were ideal if not always pliant agents. The independence of their organizational structure, competition for limited resources, and confusing jurisdictions placed them in conflict with the Franciscan province and the viceregal government in Lima, while internal fissures further compromised the missionary project. As Cameron Jones shows in his study of the Ocopa missions, accommodation and negotiation were the norm, a result of Spain's precarious hold on places far from metropolitan rule.
Chapter 1 reviews the origins of the missions, their operation, and their mixed racial composition. With benefactors unwilling to underwrite new frontier missions, Ocopa missionaries were entirely dependent on royal funds. Yet viceregal instability and intransigent viceroys, above all José Antonio Manso de Velasco (1745–61), delayed remittances, which left the missions underfunded, overextended, and vulnerable to local unrest. At least four rebellions, most commanded by disaffected local caciques, erupted in the years before 1742, when a multiethnic uprising led by the mestizo Juan Santos Atahualpa drew on regional discontent in pursuit of a restored Inca kingdom. Chapter 2 details the military expeditions sent to suppress the movement, which resulted in the destruction of nearly all of Ocopa's 23 mission stations and positioned Ocopa missionaries as a powerful threat to viceregal authority. Manso de Velasco blamed the uprising on the support of two Ocopa missionaries for a native American clergy and declined to back further military incursions. As recounted in Chapter 3, the viceroy impeded Ocopa efforts to retake lost missions and secure funding until his fall from power.
The accession of King Charles III in 1759 brought a climate of royal absolutism favorable to Ocopa missionaries. Chapter 4 relates struggles to recover lost territory and expand into new missions, including the distant island of Chiloé, after the expulsion of the Jesuits. Chapter 5 explores the “new method” of colonization, which elevated commerce over conversion as the means to expand Spain's authority along strategic frontiers and impacted Ocopa directly in the form of a regalist faction of friars who allied with the viceroy to influence elections in 1787. The ensuing crisis took years to resolve in Spain but resulted in a closer alignment of Bourbon aims and regional evangelization efforts. Before they were suppressed in 1824, Ocopa friars were placed in charge of the strategic missions of Maynas, in the tropical forests of the Amazon, although without adequate personnel to staff them.
Jones's book is among several monographs published in partnership with the Academy of American Franciscan History to promote the study of the Franciscan order in the Americas. It is of interest for its insights into the politics of Bourbon reform, the dynamics of Peruvian mission life, and the infiltration of Atlantic currents and political rifts within a prominent missionary order. Jones relies on correspondence, official reports, and plans for expansion, but also draws on ethnohistorical accounts of mission culture and demographic change to illuminate the sources. For example, large numbers of baptisms in friars’ reports, including dubious “conversions” of montaña natives at the moment of death, were aimed to loosen purse strings. Census records, another example, place the reports into perspective and reveal the ethnic composition of the missions. A 1764 confession manual indicates the friars’ interest in discerning friend and foe and suggests the divided loyalties of montañeses to the missions. A 1737 “map” of Ocopa martyrs in mission stations, read alongside the topographical representation of Lima and its environs by Manso de Velasco, paints a picture of diverging worldviews.
By featuring a major uprising that pitted Ocopa missionaries against the viceroy, Jones shows that the missionary structure was mediated by multiple groups, including non-European agents, who set the terms of Bourbon reform. Notable are the efforts of friar Calixto de San José Túpac Inka, a lay Franciscan, or donado, of noble Inca descent. The Ocopa depended on several mixed-race friars in frontier missions, and Calixto built relationships with local caciques and advocated for a native priesthood before he was exiled from Peru. He is described as representative of Ocopa's threat to viceregal power, but his stance was not apparently shared by other friars. Perhaps this is why, long after Juan Santos Atahualpa disappeared, death, deception, disease, flight, and reprisals prevailed. Even in years of peak royal support, Ocopa missionaries embarked on expeditions that “nearly stretched Ocopa's manpower to its breaking point,” (131) and missions exploded in violence. Whatever their intentions, would-be converts were apparently unimpressed.
If fastidiously detailed sections feel like digressions from the main action on Ocopa missions—the 1746 Lima earthquake and its aftermath, reformist politics in Madrid, colonization in California and along the northern frontiers of Mexico—these forays also attune readers to the urban and global processes that informed local politics and practices, and that in turn were shaped by developments on the edges of empires.
