The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule
the local environment. As a small but dedicated group of Creole scientists in Lima sponsored studies and wrote books defending scientific data generated from Indian informants in Peru, from Trujillo, Martínez Compañón and his local collaborators made their own contributions. The watercolor images and the natural history collection that they produced aggregated and displayed local knowledge of the natural world. Their work did not follow the standards of natural history illustration prescribed by academies in the metropolis, and it did not use the Linnaean system of classification that the Spanish government had made standard for naturalists working in America since 1752. Instead, the Trujillo information privileged local names, classifications, and uses, and it produced images that centered on basic description rather than parsing specimen components, as European standards suggested. Though Martínez Compañón hoped that his scientific work would be of use—or, at the very least, of interest—to bureaucrats and naturalists in Madrid, he held fast to his vision of a local utopia in Trujillo, recording, preserving, and displaying a vision of the natural world that proved that the Indians were, as he put it, “men given a rational soul just like ours.”12
Back in Spain, the experts at the Royal Pharmacy, Royal Botanical Garden, and the Royal Natural History Cabinet were uninterested in such rhetoric; they seem to have viewed the watercolors and the collection as inferior, rustic, and essentially useless. They made no effort to publish any of the Trujillo work or to use it as an exemplar for similar projects.13 The inventory was ferreted away in royal archives, the collection promptly disassembled, and its parts disseminated without being cataloged. The nine volumes of watercolors were relegated to the dusty shelves of the royal library. The utopia that Martínez Compañón had struggled to create and depict was mostly forgotten—until now.
The Bishop’s Utopia returns this encyclopedic natural history to the ideological center of Martínez Compañón’s time in Trujillo. It combines analysis of the visual data and the collection inventory with extensive archival research conducted over ten years in order to confirm that all this was mainly about one thing: the Indians. As Martínez Compañón wrote to King Charles III, it was the Indians of America who had populated his dreams as a young man in Spain. In 1786, the Bishop admitted that, like many learned Spaniards, he had “read and heard about the misfortunes and disgraces of the Indians of America, and believed that their luck was unhappy in general.” But what he had imagined, he admitted, could not begin to compare with the tragedy that he had witnessed during his twenty-three years in Peru. His time there, he wrote, had shown him that the majority of the Indians of Trujillo were “a miserable people … wherever one looks.” He believed that the Indians’ unhappiness was in many ways the fault of the Spanish, who had failed to properly instruct them in Catholic spirituality and European sociability. This neglect was manifest “in their souls” because “in their profound ignorance, they have no idea of good, bad, or virtue.” Equally upsetting was the physical misery that the Indians endured. “In sickness and in health,” he wrote, “[they] are treated with positive indolence, inhumanity, and cruelty.… [They receive] no help when they ask for it—not even that commonly given to beasts.”14 Yet he also knew that despite the abuses and misfortunes that they had endured, it was the Indians of America who could provide the labor necessary to revive the empire’s finances. In fact, Martínez Compañón’s utopia in colonial Peru was altogether predicated upon the Indians. He imagined how to improve the Indians’ financial, social, and religious lives through his schools, towns, and mining reforms. He also wanted to capitalize on their knowledge of local plant and animal life in order to bring the Spanish Crown, viceregal administrators, and the Indians themselves a financial windfall.
Improving the Indians was the Bishop’s foremost concern over the almost twelve years he served in Trujillo, but they were by no means the only inhabitants of Trujillo; the bishopric was also home to large populations of mestizos and people of African descent, but it was the Indians whom the Bishop repeatedly singled out as the focus of his reform efforts.15 He spent almost three years traveling the deserts, mountains, and rainforests of his bishopric, meeting them and assessing what their communities needed most. He found them living in dispersed settlements with no communal support. So he worked with them to establish twenty new towns that would dot the landscape with neat plazas, town councils, and parish churches. When he saw that Indian children could not learn basic reading and writing because Trujillo’s rural areas lacked primary schools, he ordered the construction of fifty-four schoolhouses, two Indian colleges, and even a school just for girls. When he discovered the horrific conditions that Indian laborers endured working at the Hualgayoc silver mine in Cajamarca, he imagined an extraordinary plan to help them, one based on a utopian mining town where workers would be given free land and farm implements in exchange for their labor underground.
Although this agenda of socioeconomic reforms marks Martínez Compañón as a classic reforming prelate of the Bourbon period, it also reveals him to be an iconoclast who promoted an expansive, innovative vision of improvement that was fundamentally utopian. The utopia that he imagined in Trujillo was a real-time contribution to the debate over the New World, one that used local initiative and natural resources to construct a program of improvement demonstrating how the people and nature of Peru were useful and productive. In Trujillo, Martínez Compañón used native knowledge and manpower to construct a utopia based on local circumstance. He fostered an agenda of social improvement and gathered a body of natural history data that offered locally calibrated solutions to economic and social problems while simultaneously demonstrating that the Indians of Trujillo were capable of becoming the very sort of useful subjects the Spanish Crown sought.
Like all other utopias that came before his and followed it, this grand vision of an idealized life never materialized as the Bishop had imagined it. But utopias would not be utopias if they existed in the material world: they are dreams, imaginings, hopes for a better future. In The Bishop’s Utopia, Martínez Compañón becomes an eloquent guide on an intellectual journey through the eighteenth-century culture of reform in the Spanish Atlantic world. The boundaries and parameters of what he imagined were marked by European reform culture and referenced past efforts of improvement in America; but ultimately, they were the product of the time and place and situation in the north of the Viceroyalty of Peru in the late eighteenth century.
Because Martínez Compañón’s imagined utopia was so inextricably linked to local context, it provides a unique opportunity to examine how the rhetoric of reform was adapted and promoted on the ground by colonial communities. Instead of reacting against the Bourbon reform agendas with violence, the people of Trujillo absorbed the discourse of reform and refashioned it into a locally based vision of improvement that would better suit their needs. With Martínez Compañón’s assistance, they imagined their own utopia in a distant corner of the Spanish Empire. They willingly adopted the rhetoric of urbane civility, public happiness, and economic utility, using it to envision how to improve their own local communities in the ways they would benefit from the most. They initiated projects to incorporate their settlements into towns and to build local primary schools. In so doing, they learned how to manage complex bureaucratic processes, how to gather and distribute information in ways that bureaucrats would accept, and how to ask for what they wanted in terms that would appeal to elites.
The Bishop’s efforts were meant to improve the lives of Trujillo’s Indians, helping them become the very sort of useful subjects that reformers in Madrid hoped to make of plebeians throughout the empire. But at an even deeper level, this agenda of social engineering and the Trujillo natural history project made an ideological statement about who the Indians were. Seeking to counter European detractors who characterized them as underdeveloped and backward, Martínez Compañón vividly displayed the Indians’ ability to produce useful knowledge, their conformance to Catholic morality and Spanish behavior, and their capacity for hard work that would enrich the state. Though it operated in real time, not on the written page, the Bishop’s utopia in Trujillo was his own contribution to the much-contested matter of whether the people and the environment of America were inherently inferior to Europe’s. In his utopia, the people of Trujillo would work with him to improve their own future, standing as a shining testament to his conviction that Indians were “equal, or very little different to the other men” around them. The Bishop’s Utopia tells the story of his struggle to make this a reality in his own little corner of the vast