In this splendid study, Erick Langer plots the story of Chiriguano communities coming into contact with Franciscan missionaries as the friars opened up and transformed Bolivia's south-eastern frontier region during a century-plus of republican rule. Like the arc of empire, Bolivia's mission system travelled through phases of growth, maturity and decline (the mission's ‘life cycle’), and this trope furnishes the book's overarching narrative framework. The book's expansive temporal horizon stretches from the immediate post-Independence period (when the new Bolivian state virtually delivered the unruly Chiriguano nations to a cadre of intrepid Italian Franciscans) to the Chaco War era (when south-eastern Bolivia became the infernal battleground of that disastrous border war). On one level, this is the familiar story of Franciscan missionaries planting the seeds of their own demise: they blazed the pathways and set up the system that would try to domesticate the frontier and its Chiriguano inhabitants, preparing the way for later streams of colonisation by the Bolivian government, the military and covetous settlers who eventually displaced the pioneering missionaries once they were no longer needed on the vanishing frontier. But, however familiar the overarching narrative, the richly layered substance of this mission history is fascinating, novel and intercultural – the fruit of painstaking archival research that allowed Langer to shift subject positions, cross over to the indigenous side and explore the ways that local Chiriguano histories of cultural survival and exchange, warfare and rebellion, left their marks on the shape and trajectory of those missions.
The vicissitudes of Franciscan missionary work were closely tied to Bolivian national politics and policies, and Langer also does an excellent job of projecting local mission history against the larger canvas of Bolivian frontier and national policy. The early chapters, for example, chronicle the dynamics of Chiriguano warfare and shifting alliances along the south-eastern frontier. The unruly frontier needed to be brought under republican rule, but the fledgling Bolivian state had little choice but to resort to colonial solutions, inviting the Franciscans to spread the light of faith, reason and civilisation into the Chiriguano lowlands. The establishment of Franciscan missions would later allow Creole settlers to fortify their own position along the Cordillera frontier. As Langer makes clear, however, it is impossible to understand mission expansion (especially in light of the absence of a coercive state apparatus reinforcing soft missionary power) without taking into account the socio-cultural imperatives that drove many Indians to join missionary settlements. Inevitably, the author is on tricky ground when he tries to intuit the various motivations that drove some Chiriguanos into mission villages, but he makes a convincing case that many Chiriguano leaders and families used the mission village as a refuge against the predations of traditional Indian rivals in an environment of endemic warfare, while others eventually turned to the mission villages for protection against territorial incursions by Creole ranchers and labour contractors. Langer thus cautions against misreading robust missionary activity on the Chiriguano frontier during the mid- to late nineteenth century as a sign of widespread religious conversion or cultural assimilation. Indeed, the book does a magnificent job of demonstrating just how recalcitrant and transient a group the Chiriguanos proved to be. Even among those long settled in missionary villages, a majority of Indians remained unconvinced and unconverted to Christianity. Franciscan policy accommodated this by routinely segregating the neophytes and the recalcitrant heathen into two camps within the mission village.
On a larger scale, the mission system was vulnerable to the forces of disease, demographic decline, the spread of Creole cattle ranching, and labour market fluctuations (especially after the Argentine sugar boom began drawing Chiriguano migrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The book furnishes a fascinating glimpse of the paradox of the missions' industrial training schools, which devoted themselves to turning young Chiriguanos into disciplined sedentary labourers only to later watch them abandon the mission to work in the sugar plantations of Jujuy and Córdoba. Perhaps the missionaries' most serious challenge came in the late nineteenth century, however, when the Chiriguano zone erupted in rebellion and warfare. Chapter 5 charts the complicated political landscape of shifting Chiriguano alliances and warfare among the traditional chiefs. Langer's detailed ethno-history of Chiriguano warfare, politics and tactical alliances during the late nineteenth century demonstrates how the chiefs retained ‘the upper hand during a large part of the missions' existence’ (p. 194).
On this point, the book draws comparison between Bolivia's flaccid republican-era missions and the fortified missions that had prevailed during the colonial era in other regions of eastern Bolivia (the chain of Jesuit missions among the Mojos, for example), as well as in northern Mexico and other parts of Spanish America where the friars worked hand-in-glove with government authorities, soldiers and presidios to discipline and convert the heathen. By contrast, the Franciscans were trying to fill a power vacuum on Bolivia's eastern frontier. Power balances remained fluid and fragile, even as traditional Chiriguano chiefs ceded ground to the missionaries towards the end of the century.
On the micro scale, however, the Franciscans proved exemplary social engineers. Langer devotes the book's middle chapters to the everyday forms of economy and society, education and socialisation, and religious rules and rituals of the mission village. We are treated to ethnographic examinations of all facets of mission life. Langer approaches the study of disciplinary power as the site of tension and negotiation between Indians and missionaries, even as the stakes and terms of that negotiation process ultimately shifted against Chiriguano economic and cultural autonomy. Directly or indirectly, missionary and Hispanic influences transformed all of the Chiriguano communities in profound ways – although not always as the Franciscans had intended. Endemic tribal warfare gradually subsided, more Indians were converted, and many traditional chiefs lost their authority, but the friars' authority was also in decline, and their mission population gradually dwindled to women, small children and old men – those souls left behind by Chiriguano migrants gone to Argentina's sugar fields. By the early twentieth century, signs of institutional decay were everywhere, and it was becoming clear that the missions had outlived their usefulness to both the Bolivian state and Creole land grabbers and ranchers.
As Langer notes, this slice of Latin American frontier history languished on the historiographic sidelines for a long time. Beyond the pioneering work of Thierry Saignes, few historians have studied the historical and cultural topography of the Chiriguanos, and even less so for the post-Independence era. It is no small measure of this book's worth to say that Langer has brought this corner of nineteenth-century Latin America into full view for the first time. Nor is that the sum of his achievement, for the book also seeks to engage conceptual issues that have animated recent works in comparative frontier history. Indeed, Langer has long contributed to ‘the new mission history’ that examines native and European cultures and institutions coming into contact and transforming each other. In this book, Langer analyses how a particular combination of physical, cultural and institutional environments shaped and ultimately doomed the missionary enterprise. Confronting a resilient indigenous population never bowed by the Incas or Spaniards, and in the absence of a coercive state apparatus, the Franciscans were thrown into the bush on their own and forced to improvise, adapt and accommodate local conditions as they tried to carve proto-industrial Christian utopias out of the jungle.
In the area of historical legacies, Langer's conclusions are ambiguous – perhaps because the missionaries themselves were only partially successful in achieving their goals (and in any case, the friars were profoundly ambivalent about the republican ideal of converting ‘savages’ into citizens). Rhetorically wedded to the moral uplift and political integration of their Indian charges, the missionaries ‘failed to inculcate the idea of Bolivian citizenship’ and aimed solely at remaking Indians into a subaltern labouring class on the frontier. In this sense it might be argued that the missionaries actually served the interests of Bolivia's political elite, which had little interest in bringing Indians into the nation-state as political subjects and citizens until well into the twentieth century.
