The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule
close by to monitor them. Because they came from provincial communities themselves, local Indians, mestizos, and people of African descent would more readily accept them. They could stand in for civil government in areas where this often seemed entirely absent. With the operarios constantly reinforcing and spreading their mission, the seminaries would become vital support systems for the improved future of the bishopric. Like the preceding institutions and clergy who inspired them, the operarios would become foot soldiers of a future utopia.
Martínez Compañón imagined that of the four schools, Trujillo’s Seminario de Operarios del Salvador would hold jurisdiction over the other three. It opened its doors in September 1785, with the accompanying fanfare of a ceremony he later described as lengthy and well attended.15 In June of the following year, the seminary was confirmed by a royal decree. But official approval was never secured for the remaining three seminaries. Later referring to the attempt to found one in Cajamarca, Martínez Compañón worried about “the distrust of the town to be able to form an institution that it does not know, and has no experience with.” There was also the ubiquitous problem of lack of funds. The Bishop hoped to raise money for the seminaries through redistributing cofradía religious brotherhood income and selecting parish priests to serve in vacant parishes in Trujillo, so that they might hold Mass regularly and generate more tithe income. He also hoped that, since Indian children were welcome to be educated at the seminaries, native communities would make small annual donations for their operation costs. But none of these measures worked. When he found himself still unable to raise adequate finances for the seminarios by 1788, the Bishop turned to the ecclesiastical cabildo of Trujillo—which also denied the support that he needed to sustain the schools. The Spanish, mestizo, and Indian operarios would not become the foot soldiers of reform he had imagined they could be.16
While it must have been disappointing, the community’s general lack of interest in the seminaries had ample historical precedent: early attempts to allow Indians into the priesthood in sixteenth-century Mexico were promptly squashed with a 1555 Provincial Council ban—a prohibition that was first iterated in Peru in 1551 and again in 1567. As the career of archbishop Rubio y Salinas demonstrates, even in mid-eighteenth-century Mexico, a plan to found a seminary for Indian students was rejected, largely because of prejudice toward allowing Indians into higher education as well as fears about taking positions away from Spanish and mestizo priests.17
Although the seminaries that Martínez Compañón envisioned were not successful, Trujillo did not generally lack for religious figures. The bishopric was home to twenty-one monasteries and three convents, with the majority of the regular clergy being Franciscans, Mercederians, and Bethlehemites who lived in monasteries in the main population areas. As regulars, they were bound to follow the rules of their own orders; but the remaining priests and assistants who made up the secular clergy of Trujillo were directly subject to Martínez Compañón’s rule. Many of these were curas administering to the Spaniards, mestizos, and people of African descent who belonged to their own parishes, known as curatos, often located in the most densely settled coastal regions of the province. The less educated priests (often mestizos) who administered to the doctrinas, or Indian parishes, were known as curas doctrineros. Most often, their work brought them to the sierra towns where the largest groups of natives lived. In even more rural areas, traveling priests staffed ancillary churches called añejos. Especially in the jungle and the sierra, añejos were often located far from the communities they were meant to serve, limiting access to sacraments and worship.18
This isolation was even more problematic because in rural areas, priests and their assistants were sometimes the only Spaniards or mestizos of authority closely involved in daily life. Recognizing this, Martínez Compañón reminded Trujillo’s parish priests that one of their most important duties was to “reduce the Indians to civil life in town” by ensuring that all their charges lived “within the sound of the bell,” meaning that they could literally as well as figuratively be reached by their priest and their church. They were also to ensure adherence to the sacraments of communion, marriage, confession, and extreme unction. They should carefully record all births, deaths, marriages, and baptisms in their parishes, and keep meticulous tallies of all church income. They were to oversee proper behavior in the home, ensuring that parents married and that male and female children were properly clothed and that they slept in bedrooms separated by sex. With adults, they were to discourage drunkenness and adultery and to forbid men and women from bathing together in the same place.
While typical, such spiritual and moral directives were far from the only responsibilities Martínez Compañón gave to his parish priests. He also intended for them to participate in his vision of economic development, relying on them to share technological innovation, moral support, and organizational skills with the people. He told them to “speak lovingly of the fields” where the Indians worked, to explain which crops were best cultivated there, to show how to weed the soil, and to discuss how to grow fruit trees. He mandated that priests support young Indian women in their parishes by reallocating cofradía funds to buy them spinning wheels or pairs of oxen that would help supplement their household income. He also sought their help in building primary schools in his territory, as we will explore in greater detail in Chapter 4. In the Bishop’s utopia, priests were essential collaborators who would use their daily interactions with the local population to gather the data that he needed to construct his vision of reform for Trujillo.19
While promoting agricultural improvement and primary education might have been some of their most enjoyable responsibilities, priests in Trujillo also oversaw policía, or general orderliness in their parishes—a task that occasionally proved quite trying. In 1786, Francisco Simeón de Polo reported on a striking episode of unruliness from Saña, north of Trujillo. It began one night when two mestizos and a mulatto (who happened to be mute) were rehearsing for a play celebrating the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe and decided to partake in some unsanctioned merrymaking. Breaking into the local church, they pulled the statue of Mary from its display and headed for the room where the Augustinian brothers stored their religious garb. One mestizo donned a white ecclesiastical garment and a choir member’s cape, while the other found a frock with an image of San Francisco. Their mute mulatto companion dressed in the traditional black, long-sleeved habit of the Augustinian monks. The three proceeded to “make a scene … yelling as if they were preaching” to lampoon the strict Augustinian brothers (the documents do not suggest how a mute could have joined in this parody). The townspeople who had gathered nearby to enjoy a bonfire joined in their mockery until the wee hours of the morning, leaving the priest to report that, had he been there, “he would have instituted a remedy to avoid such excess and irreverence.” Later, he got his wish, as only one month after the incident was first drawn to Martínez Compañón’s attention, the Bishop decreed Polo to be a priest of “discernment, virtue, and discretion” who could conduct an investigation into the matter on his own. Leaving the matter to the priest’s discretion demonstrates how much the Bishop relied on his priests to maintain order and decorum at the local level. It was impossible for Martínez Compañón to personally ensure that his orders were followed, so he had to trust his priests to enforce proper decorum in the church and its environs. But this responsibility was only one aspect of a much bigger, and more innovative, role that he had planned for them in helping to build a utopia in Trujillo.20
Priests as Informants
Once the Bishop’s duties in the provincial capital were well under way, he turned to tasks elsewhere in his bishopric. To start, Martínez Compañón knew that he needed a thorough understanding of the 93,205 square miles of extreme geographic diversity that made up Trujillo, and he planned to obtain it by personally visiting as much of it as possible. His task of assessing such a large area was not simple—in fact, no prelate had traveled extensively in northern Peru since Archbishop Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo of Lima in the late 1500s. But eighteenth-century reform culture promoted the pastoral visita as the most efficient and thorough method of gathering data to promote reform at the provincial level. Charles III was so convinced of the visita’s utility that in 1776, he mandated that all American prelates make thorough visitations of their territories and remit the data to the Council