Unas Fotografías Para Dar a Conocer Al Mundo La Civilización de La República Guaraya

Abstract

The last several decades have seen growth in the number of studies of missions on the frontiers of Spanish America. Most relate the history of missions established during the colonial period, but several recent contributions deal with missions that operated following the independence of most Latin American countries, and as late as the first decades of the twentieth century. Erick Langer’s study of the Franciscan Chiriguano missions of eastern Bolivia comes to mind (Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830 – 1949, 2009). The author of this book, Pilar García Jordán, has also previously published on the subject of Republican Franciscan missions in eastern Bolivia, in this case among the Guaraya, who live in northern Santa Cruz Department, north of the well-known colonial Chiquitos missions founded at the end of the seventeenth century by the Jesuits.In this volume García Jordán presents a collection of black-and-white photographs of the Guaraya missions, missionaries, and native residents of the missions taken in the first decades of the twentieth century, during the period of the so-called República Guaraya, which was the result of a Franciscan policy that attempted to shelter the Guaraya from the outside world. The author also provides a historical overview of the Guaraya missions, based upon her previously published research.The first part of the book chronicles the history and to a lesser extent the culture of the Guaraya. García Jordán begins the book with the juxtaposed ethnohistoric views of the Guaraya of the French traveler Alcides D’Orbigny, who visited the Guaraya in 1831 – 32, and Franciscan missionary José Cos, O.F.M., stationed on the Guaraya missions from about 1840 to 1877. This is the most that the reader learns about the Guaraya themselves, since the author’s historical overview is driven primarily by the documents written by the Franciscan missionaries. The author is not an ethnohistorian and emphasizes the political, policy, and economic sides of mission history, with a short discussion of movements in the size of the total mission populations.The Guaraya had some previous contact with the Jesuits stationed on the Chiquitos missions, and the Jesuits visited the Guaraya and convinced a few to relocate to the missions. Franciscans from the apostolic college at Tarata (Cochabamba) assumed responsibility for the establishment of missions among the Guaraya in the 1790s. A royal decree in 1792 formally ordered the establishment of the new missions. In 1851, 2,306 natives lived on three missions, and in the early twentieth century the Franciscans administered five missions with a population of 5,486. The government of Germán Busch ordered the secularization of the missions in 1939.The author provides a considerable amount of information in tabular form about the missions, although she mostly focuses on the running of the missions and the missionaries themselves, including a prosopographical analysis of the Franciscans. Other information includes the total mission populations, numbers of livestock, and data on agricultural production, all culled from reports the missionaries drafted. The author has taken some ethnographic data from the writings of the missionaries, such as the gender division of labor. However, overall, the perspective the book offers is from the top down, and there is very little about the Guaraya.The second section of the book introduces and presents selected photographs. The photographs have a kind of National Geographic travel quality to them. Many are photographs of the mission buildings and the Franciscan missionaries. There are also depictions of Guarayas, but they are posed as natives showing their skills as archers or in group shots. Many photographs depict groups of natives nude. They are examples of the packaging of the exotic other for Western audiences, shown in ways meant to reinforce the cultural superiority of Western civilization and culture. Given the time period of the photographs, the first third of the twentieth century, the selection, themes, and composition of the photographs is not surprising.This volume is a useful reference tool within limits imposed by the focus on information derived from missionary reports and the Franciscan perspective. The Guaraya do not have a voice in this book and in the photographs almost appear as props or a backdrop to the story of the Franciscan missions and missionaries. The author does not offer an ethnohistorical perspective for a period for which there was a growing ethnographic literature. With these limitations in mind, this volume is still a useful contribution to the literature.