Since the writings of the French naturalist Alcide d'Orbigny in the 1790s, the Chiquitos have been characterized as the quintessential acculturated, Hispanicized “mission Indians” of the Jesuit mission system. This identity has only been solidified in the past few decades, by the selection of six of the former Chiquito/Jesuit mission churches as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Cecilia Martínez attempts to go beyond seeing Chiquito society and culture as simply a by-product of Jesuit evangelization: she recognizes a process of ethnogenesis that resulted not just from interactions with the missionaries, but also with other groups, including neighboring indigenous nations and non-Jesuit Europeans, mestizos, and Africans. To create this more comprehensive vision of Chiquito cultural formation, she examines the little-studied documentation from the years following the 1767 expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish empire.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part lays out the basic geography and history of the Chiquitos from the pre-Columbian era through the present. The Chiquitania (the region where the Chiquitos live) is in the high jungle region between the Guapay and Paraguay rivers, along the border of Bolivia and Brazil. It marks the dividing line between the hot, humid, verdant Amazon and the dry, hot plains of the Grand Chaco. This location meant that the region lies on the border between two climatic zones and between two empires (and two future nations), making it fertile territory for a supranational organization like the Jesuits to take control and shape its institutions and cultural practices.
The second part departs from the often-repeated characterization of the Chiquitos as simply Jesuit neophytes. First, Martínez looks at the name ‘Chiquitos,’ which has been seen traditionally as a reference to their small houses (chiquito means “tiny” in Spanish). Martínez argues that this name may have been the result of other cultural interactions with neighboring indigenous groups and may have had connotations of dominance or slavery, or even was an attempt to diminish the traditionally bellicose Chiquitos. The second half of the book extends this type of analysis to the Jesuit reductions of the Chiquitos, suggesting that practices traditionally associated with the Jesuits within Chiquito culture were the results of more complex processes.
The third part contains the real evidence of the book's thesis, examining how groups other than the Jesuits affected the Chiquitos’ formation. It first looks at the circulation of European goods, both as gifts from the Jesuits and as trade goods bought from other outside sources. These trade goods connoted power among the Chiquitos because they aided farming. Axes and machetes were particularly useful for slash-and-burn agriculture. Thus, outside traders could exert influence on the community. Merchants circulated throughout the region along with other people of indigenous, European, and especially African descent. Traditionally the Jesuit missions have been seen as self-sustaining and walled-off polities; however, the truth is far different: many groups interacted with the Chiquitos throughout the colonial period. The third part of the book discusses the Chiquito-Guaycurú war. This almost three-decade-long conflict after the Jesuit expulsion is one of the best pieces of evidence for a separate, self-sustaining Chiquitos identity that existed apart from their relationship to the Jesuits.
Although it is sometimes difficult to follow the structure of the book, it is a well-executed attempt to explain the history of an indigenous group on its own terms, not just through the lenses of Europeans. The author incorporates literature from both English- and Spanish-speaking scholarship well, and the book proves an excellent addition to the literature in furthering scholars’ understanding of the cultures of the Spanish American borderlands.
