"Enemies of the State": the detention in Spain of missionaries from the northern Frontier of México after the Jesuit Expulsión.

“Enemigos del estado”. La detención en España de los misioneros de la frontera norte de México, luego de la expulsión Jesuítica.

Robert H. Jackson

Investigador independiente

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6619-4707

robertvianey@gmail.com

Abstract

In 1767, Spanish King Carlos III ordered the expulsion of the members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) from all Spanish dominions. The King ordered the Jesuits to be sent to the Papal States in Italy. However, a small number of Jesuits who had staffed missions on the north Mexican frontier were held in captivity in Spain, as “enemies of the state.” They had knowledge of the frontier, and royal officials feared they might provide this information to Spain`s enemies. This prosoprographic study analysis the profile of the missionaries, and their fate following the Jesuit expulsion. It also compares this group of missionaries with another group, the Jesuits stationed on the missions among the Guaraní in South America. Those that survived the trip to Europe went into exile in Italy. They were not deemed to be a security threat.

Keywords: Jesuit Missionaries, Frontier Missions, Mexico, Guaraní Missions

Resumen

En 1767, el rey español Carlos III ordenó la expulsión de los miembros de la Compañía de Jesús (jesuitas) de todos los dominios españoles. El Rey ordenó que los jesuitas fueran enviados a los Estados Pontificios en Italia. Sin embargo, un pequeño número de jesuitas que habían trabajado en misiones en la frontera norte de México fueron retenidos en cautiverio en España, como "enemigos del estado". Tenían conocimiento de la frontera y los funcionarios reales temían que pudieran proporcionar esta información a los enemigos de España. Este estudio prosoprográfico analiza el perfil de los misioneros y su suerte tras la expulsión de los jesuitas. También compara este grupo de misioneros con otro grupo, los jesuitas estacionados en las misiones entre los guaraníes en América del Sur. Los que sobrevivieron al viaje a Europa se exiliaron en Italia. No se consideró que fueran una amenaza para la seguridad.

Palabras clave: Misioneros jesuitas, Misiones de frontera, México, Misiones guaraníes

Fecha de envío: 5 de junio de 2023

Fecha de aceptación: 5 de agosto de 2023

On June 25, 1767, royal officials across Spanish America began to implement the royal order of King Carlos III (1759-1788) to expel the members of the Society of Jesus from his dominions. The King ordered the majority of the Jesuits to be sent to the Papal States in what today is Italy. The majority of the Jesuits in the Provincia de Nueva España (Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala) were natives of the Americas who had joined the Society of Jesus. However, the Jesuit leadership chose to staff the newer missions on the northern frontier with Europeans, including members from countries other than Spain. A 1775 report summarized the outcome of the expulsion process, and the place of residence of the surviving expelled Jesuits (see Table 1). The report noted that 16 Jesuits from the Provincia de Nueva España were still being held in Spain as if they were “Enemies of the State,” although the number appears to have been higher.¹ Most spent the rest of their lives in Spain, and died there. This study examines the fate of the ex-missionaries held in Spain.

The timing of the expulsion Is important for understanding the decision made to hold a number of the Jesuits from the frontier missions in Spain as if they were “enemies of the state.” Five years earlier, in 1762, British amphibious operations resulted in the capture of Havana in Cuba and Manila in the Philippines. This defeat during the Seven Years War (1755-1763) increased a growing paranoia of growing British military might, and particularly of a perceived threat to Spanish territories in the Americas. The Crown responded by implementing military reform. However, the Visitador-General José de Gálvez y Gallardo, who oversaw the expulsion order in Mexico, also moved to occupy California, which was a strategic territory beyond the Spanish frontier, before the English or Russians did (Jackson, 2022; Astorgano Abajo, 2021).² Gálvez feared that Spain`s rivals would occupy territory beyond the frontier to serve as a base of operations for an invasion of Nueva España. The Jesuits who staffed the northernmost missions in Sonora, for example, had unique information regarding a sparsely populated frontier region with valuable mines (see Figure 1). Because of their knowledge, royal officials decided to hold them in Spain indefinitely. Those held included natives of Mexico and Spain, but also non-Spanish Europeans from the Asistencia of Germany.

The analysis of the fate of the Jesuit missionaries assigned to the northern frontier missions is based on a prosoprographic reconstruction, or collective biography. It is based on four sources. One is a 1769 list of the Jesuits in the Americas who embarked on ships for exile in Europe (Uburu de Toro, June 30, 1769). It is not a complete list of all of the Jesuits in the Americas at the time of the expulsion. Some died in the Americas before reaching the ships, and others were sent in a different manner and reached Spain later. This was the case of the missionaries stationed on the Maynas missions in the Amazon region. Royal officials had them sent first to Portugal down the Amazon River, and then on to Spain. The second is a detailed 1775 report that summarized the outcome of the expulsion process, and the amount of a pension paid to the expelled Jesuits (Archimbaud y Solano, October 31, 1775 1775). The third is a detailed account of what happened to the Jesuits in the Provincia de Nueva España following the expulsion started by the Veracruz native Rafale Zelis, S.J., and continued following his death (Zelis, Mexico City, 1871). A modern source, the Diccionario Bio-Biográfico de la Compañía de Jesús en México (Zambrano, Mexico City, 1961-1977) provides additional information on the Jesuits in Mexico.

Figure 1: A 1727 map showing the Jesuit missions on the northern frontier. Archivo General de las Indias, Sevilla, Spain.

To provide context for the treatment of the missionaries stationed on the northern frontier missions, a comparison is made with the post-expulsion experiences of the missionaries stationed on the missions among the Guaraní in the Rio de la Plata region of South America. The 1769 list (Uburu de Toro, June 30, 1769) contains the names of 78 of the missionaries who had been stationed on the missions. Information on their place of origin and place of death is abstracted from another modern source, the Catalogo de los Jesuitas de la Provincia de Paraguay (Cuenca Del Plata) 1585-1768 (Storni, Rome, 1980). The analysis of this group of missionaries shows a very different pattern from that of those on the northern frontier of Mexico.

The number of missions the Jesuits administered on the northern frontier of Mexico had already been reduced a decade before the expulsion order as a result of an initiative by royal officials to secularize older doctrinas and missions, and to transfer them to episcopal authority. Reform-minded ministers including the marqués de la Ensenada (War, Treasury, Naval and the Indies) and José de Carvajal y Lancáster (State) moved to replace the regular clergy that administered the doctrinas with secular clergy when they became vacant. On October 4, 1749, King Ferdinand VI issued a royal decree on secularization in the Archbishoprics of Peru, México City, and Bogota in modern Colombia. Four years later, on February 1, 1753, a second decree extended the secularization to all of Spanish America (Kuethe and Andrien, 2018, 185-188, 194).

The decrees primarily targeted doctrinas first established in the sixteenth century, and not most frontier missions. The administration of doctrinas by members of regular orders began as a temporary expedient in the period immediately following the Spanish conquest, but in some instances continued for more than two centuries even with a growth in the number of secular-clergy. The missionary orders tried to counter the secularization decrees by writing missives, challenging implementation in the royal bureaucracy such as the Council of the Indies, and outright obstruction such as naming “interim” priests so that parishes would not go vacant. A decree of June 23, 1757, allowed the missionary orders to continue to administer some of the wealthier parishes. By that date the key architects of the secularization policy had either died or had fallen from power as was the case of Ensenada (Kuethe and Andrien, 2018, 195). Nevertheless, the process of secularization went forward.

The 1749 decree resulted in the secularization of older Jesuit missions in Nueva Vizcaya that dated to the early seventeenth century. The Jesuits themselves had already initiated a proposal in 1745 to pass a number of older missions to the authority of the Bishop of Durango in order to be able to assign more personnel to the expanding California mission frontier (Deeds, 2003, 155-157) (see Figure 2). Following the issue of the 1749 royal decree ordering secularization, royal officials moved forward with the transfer of the older Jesuit administered missions in Tepehuana and the Tarahumara Bajo to episcopal authority. The process did not always go smoothly, and some indigenous-folk protested the change. However, the Jesuits began the process of surrendering the missions in August of 1753, and the process had concluded by May of the following year (Deeds, 2003, 172-177).

The Profile of the Missionaries on the northern frontier of Nueva España

At the time of the expulsion the majority of the Jesuits in the Provincia de Nueva España were American-born, and most were natives of what today is Mexico. The profile of the Jesuits assigned to frontier missions in northern New Spain, however, was quite different. As seen in the cases of Chinipas that included Tepehuanes and Raramuri, Sonora and California. Unlike the urban institutions where Americans predominated, the Jesuits assigned to these missions were mostly Europeans. The Nayarit and Sinaloa missions were the exception. In the case of Nayarit four Jesuits were natives of Nueva España, but two were from Spain and one from France. The profile for the Chinipas missions shows one from Nueva España, four from Spain, two from Bohemia and one from neighboring Moravia, and one each from Germany and Italy. In the case of Sonora, eight missionaries were natives of Nueva España, including two from Mexico City and one from Puebla. However, 21 were from Europe, including 12 from Spain, six from what today is Germany, two from Bohemia, and one from Austria, all in the Asistencia Germánica. The profile of the missionaries in California showed an even more marked preference for Europeans. Two were from Mexico City, and the rest were Europeans: six from Spain, three from Germany, four from Bohemia, and one from Austria (see Tables 2-4). In terms of the age profile there was a mix of older veterans in their 40s and 50s, and younger missionaries. This profile strongly suggests that the Jesuit leadership had greater confidence in the ability of Europeans as missionaries on the northern frontier of Nueva España. This most likely was a manifestation of the bias of the European-born who believed that natives of the Americas were inferior. It was this idea that Veracruz native Francisco Javier Clavijero, S.J. challenged in his writings.

Figure 2: A c. 1758 map of the Jesuit missions in Sinaloa and Sonora, and the missions of Nueva Vizcaya and Topia transferred to episcopal authority. Mapoteca Orozco y Berra, Mexico City.

Graph 1: Place of origin of the Jesuits stationed on the northern frontier missions in June of 1767

Following the expulsion most of the Jesuits who survived the process of expulsion lived in Italy. Twelve missionaries died in Mexico in transit to exile, including ten who died in Ixtlan (Nayarit). The pattern of deaths there suggests that they arrived during an epidemic. Another died at sea. Some were ill at the time of their arrival in the Puerto de Santa María and could not continue their journey. The Nayarit missionary Bartolomé Wolff (d. August 27, 1768), and the Sonora missionaries Jose Roldan (d. September 21, 1770) and Francisco Paver (d. January 6, 1770) were among the group that died in Mexico. However, others were held in Spain for different reasons. This was the case with 16 of the Jesuits who had been stationed on the Sonora missions. They initially were held in prison in the Puerto de Santa María, however the record of their lives in Spain is incomplete. For example, royal officials allowed Miguel Getzner to return to Germany in 1780. On the other hand, the Spanish-born Miguel Almela was held a prisoner in the Franciscan convent in Villalon for some 20 years, and died in Spain in 1792. In 1775, Jose Garrucho was being held in prison in Madrid. He died in 1783 in a Jeronymite convent where he was also being held. The last record for seven of the Sonora missionaries was that they were still being held in the Puerto de Santa María in 1775. Of the eight missionaries in the Pimeria Alta which was the northernmost part of Sonora, one died in 1768, a second in 1770 in the Puerto de Santa María, and the other six were held in Spain on the orders of royal officials. Two others held in Spain had staffed Cucurpe and Opodepe missions, located just south of the Pimeria Alta. Two others had been in the Pimeria Alta, but at the time of the expulsion were at missions further south (see Table 2, Table 5). This supports the hypothesis that royal officials considered them to be security risks.

Figure 3: A 1757 map of the Pimeria Alta missions in northern Sonora. Archivo General de las Indias, Sevilla, Spain.

Graph 2: Place of death of the missionaries stationed on the northern frontier

The record shows that 12 of the missionaries who had been stationed on the Sinaloa missions also were held in or returned later to Spain, and died there. They were a mix of American-born and European-born. Of those who died in Spain, eight were natives of Mexico, three from Spain, and one non-Spanish European. The Mexico City native José Garfias, for example, who was the rector of the colegio in Sinaloa. He died in Spain in 1779. The Austrian George Fraidenegg and the Tlapujahua (Michoacán) native Juan Acuña were held in the Puerto de Santa Maria, and died there in April of 1775 and January of 1774 respectively. Fraidenegg obviously was not allowed to return to his province as did other non-Spanish European-born missionaries. Juan Salgado from Copala in Sonora was also held in Spain, and died there in 1781.

One of the missionaries, Lorenzo Cabo, who was a native of Guadalajara in Jalisco, was among a small group of Jesuits who illegally returned to Mexico in 1799. He died there in 1803. There were at least five and perhaps six others who were in the group that attempted to return to Mexico. Two died in Havana in 1799. They were Atanacio Portillo who was a native of Guatemala and Pedro Navarrete who was a native of Pátzcuaro. The Veracruz native Jose Cosio was captured and held in the Franciscan convent in Veracruz where he died in 1805. Cabo and a second made it to Mexico City, where they were captured and held captive. Joaquin Maneiro, also a native of Veracruz, was captured again in 1801 and was held in the convent of San Diego where he died in 1802. Manuel Miranda from Tlacomulco (Estado de Mexico) may have been in the group as well. He was in Italy following the expulsion, but died in San Luis Potosi in 1803.

How does this pattern of Jesuit missionaries having been classified as “enemies of the state” compare with the fate of other Jesuits assigned to frontier missions? An analysis of the data on the 78 Jesuits stationed on the Guaraní missions from a 1769 list of Jesuits who embarked on ships in the Americas in route to Europe documents a very different pattern of treatment for another group of missionaries. The majority of the missionaries were from Europe from Spain the provinces in the Asistencia of Germany, and the American-born were only a small minority 12. Of this group of missionaries, 15 died in Spain. One died in Cádiz Bay and eleven in the Puerto de Santa María waiting for transport to Italy. The 1775 report does not list any of the missionaries as being held in Spain. Nine returned to their province in the German Asistencia, and 45 reached exile in Italy and died there. Ten died at sea when the ship that transported them sank (see Tables 7-9, Graphs 3-4). This group of missionaries was not considered to be a security threat.

Graph 3: Place of origin of the Jesuits stationed on the Guarani Missions in June of 1767

Graph 4: Place of death of the Jesuits stationed on the Guarani Missions in June of 1767

Conclusions

Following the Spanish defeat in the Seven Years War (1755-1763), royal officials were increasingly apprehensive of the threat to its American territories by Spain`s European rivals, and particularly the English. One immediate response was the formation for the first time of an army in Spanish America to defend against a potential invasion. The Visitador-General José de Gálvez y Gallardo, who also oversaw the expulsion of the Jesuits in Mexico, organized the occupation of California in 1769. California was a strategic region beyond the frontier that the Spaniish had explored, but had not occupied. Gálvez ordered its immediate occupation in response to a perceived threat of its occupation by the Russians or the English. It was this atmosphere of paranoia that dictated decisions regarding the exile of Jesuits who had been assigned to missions on the north Mexican frontier.

The majority of the Jesuits went into exile in the Papal States in Italy. However, royal officials had a group of the missionaries who had been stationed on missions on the frontier of Mexico held in Spain, where most eventually died. They had detailed information regarding the northern frontier that royal officials feared would have been shared with Spain`s enemies had they been allowed to go into exile. The group of Jesuits held in Spain were natives of Spain and Mexico, but also non-Spanish Europeans from provinces in the German Asistencia. The production of texts on the Americas written by exiled Jesuits following the expulsion shows that there was a potential for the dissemination of sensitive information.

The decision to hold the missionaries in Spain was unique in the process of the expulsion of the members of the Society of Jesus. An analysis of the treatment of the Jesuits stationed on the missions among the Guaraní in South America shows a very different pattern. The majority of the missionaries were European-born from Spain, but also from other European regions such as the provinces in the German Asistencia. Those who survived the trip to Europe went into exile in Italy. A number returned to their provinces in what today is Germany, the Czech Republic, and neighboring countries. They were not considered to be a security threat.

Table 1: The Location of the exiled Jesuits as of October 1, 1775

Table 2: Jesuit Missionaries on selected Missions in northern Nueva España

Table 3: Jesuit missionaries in Sinaloa in June of 1767

Table 4: Jesuit Missionaries in the Tarahumara Missions in June of 1767

Table 5: Missionaries held in Spain following the Expulsion

Table 6: Missionaries from Sinaloa who were held and died in Spain

Table 7: Jesuits stationed on the missions among the Guarani in June of 1767

Table 8: Place of origin of the Jesuits on the missions among the Guaraní in June of 1767

Table 9: Place of death of the Jesuits on the missions among the Guaraní in June of 1767

Bibliography

Documentary Sources

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