The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule

so-called Spanish Conquest certainly delivered. In just forty-one years, the Spanish had “discovered” the Indies and conquered the great Aztec and Inca nations. They captured staggering amounts of gold and silver, which they piled onto treasure fleets that cut across the ocean waves, relentlessly pursued by pirates and buccaneers. Columbus’s prognostications about the vast untapped resources of America—especially the mineral ones—seemed thrillingly prophetic. A land with so much wealth in gold and silver could readily become a utopia like those that the Renaissance authors had imagined.

      Yet amid such fabulous wealth and excess, a small minority of Spaniards was starting to realize that in the everyday lives of most people in colonial Spanish America, utopia was very far from reality. In his Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, first published in Seville in 1552, conquistador-turned-Dominican-friar Bartolomé de Las Casas vividly recalled the atrocities of Spanish behavior toward the Indians, describing how Spaniards “smilingly” maimed, tortured, and enslaved innocent natives.²⁸ It was not long before the rest of Europe caught wind of Las Casas’s accounts, and by the end of the century, his work had been republished and translated so many times that it was accessible in some form to “nearly anyone literate in his own language.” In the seventeenth century, Dutch printer Theodor de Bry published ten more lavish editions of the Brief Account with woodcut engravings featuring sensational images of Las Casas’s most vivid scenes, such as a Spaniard dashing an Indian baby against a rock and an Indian chief being burned at the stake. These lurid images helped make the book an “unquestioned commercial and propagandistic success” that would ultimately become the “cornerstone” of the Black Legend of Spain’s singular cruelty in the New World.²⁹

      Even if Las Casas’s work was purposely provocative, he reported on the grim reality of the encounter between the old world and the new in America. But as he might well have imagined, the horrors of the early conquest soon gave way to less shocking—but equally insidious—injustices to native peoples. The imagined utopia slipped further from reach as an Indian slave trade flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century in Central America, with Spaniards exporting chattel slaves to Panama and Peru. Once the idea was first articulated in the 1512 Laws of Burgos, Indian family and kinship groups were periodically broken up and relocated into settlements called reducciones, where the Spanish imagined that they could be more easily monitored for “correct” behavior—and forced to pay tribute and labor duties. Natives were also bound to the Spanish through the encomienda system, which rewarded Spanish conquistadores for their service to the Crown by giving them Indian vassals to use as laborers. Spanish legislators reasoned that as vassals, the Indians owed tribute, in the form of cash, goods, or labor, for the “privilege” of being governed by Spaniards. Some met these duties through a practice known as the mita in Peru and the repartimiento de Indios in New Spain, wherein they were forced to work in rotational labor drafts in fields, workshops, or mines for two to four months out of the year.³⁰

      By the 1530s, the injustices against the Indians had multiplied so many times that Spanish bureaucrat Vasco de Quiroga penned a treatise about the legal and ethical wrongs of Indian treatment in New Spain and sent it off to Madrid. In addition to listing countless injustices, Quiroga’s Information on the Law provided a blueprint for how the Crown might raise an improved society from the ashes of destruction in America. To conceive of this new colony, Quiroga drew on one of the visionary works of his day: Thomas More’s Utopia. Like More, he imagined a society composed of extended families that shared community property. Children would receive free primary education, as well as instruction in farming techniques and Christian doctrine. The towns that he would create for the Indians would feature free hospitals to care for the elderly and infirm. They would be overseen by just Spanish officials and priests. The Indians who came to reside in his so-called pueblo-hospitales had to contribute to the communal lifestyle by working in trades, crafts, or agriculture. They were even given rights over their property, so they were able to pass it on to their children. Quiroga had faith in his agenda because he was convinced that the Indians were a childlike, uncorrupted race whose souls could be carefully molded—like “soft wax”—through evangelization and proper socialization.³¹

      To make his utopian vision a reality, Quiroga purchased portions of the land that he needed and requested that local landowners donate the rest. He relied on the Indians themselves to help erect the settlements: they would build the thatched huts that would be their homes, they would adorn the churches where they would worship, and they would farm the fields that would provide them with sustenance. To further entice them, he offered baptisms and hosted games and activities for children. Soon Indians who had no prior sustained contact with Spaniards were voluntarily arriving at Santa Fé de México, Santa Fé de Laguna, and Santa Fé del Rio—and choosing to stay. Quiroga ensured that the towns and the hospitals would have a steady supply of Spanish priests when he founded the College of San Nicolás in Pátzcuaro, which would train clerics in native languages. By 1534, news of his efforts had reached Madrid, and Charles signed a royal decree granting his projects official approval. Two years later, he was rewarded when he was promoted to become bishop of Michoacán. Quiroga’s utopia enjoyed the support of the Crown, administrators in America, and the townspeople themselves. The hospitals operated for thirty years. By 1570, the town of Santa Fé de México was home to around 500 Indians. Their descendants still live nearby.³²

      Although Quiroga’s utopia flourished, it failed to inspire a more systematic improvement in the way Indians were treated in colonial Spanish America. Labor drafts, special taxes, seizure of communal land, and violent persecution of native customs continued. By the mid-eighteenth century, Spanish ministers were forced to recognize that though their financial and political problems extended beyond America, revamping colonial policy—and especially its treatment of the Indians—was Spain’s best hope at reversing its downward spiral. In 1743, Spanish minister José del Campillo y Cossío submitted to King Philip V a comprehensive plan for economic reform in the Indies, called the New System of Economic Government for America. Campillo suggested that Spain follow the lead of the French and the English in reconceiving its colonies. The Americas, he argued, should no longer be viewed as “overseas kingdoms” or portions of Spain that happened to lie an ocean away. Rather, they should have their own laws and statutes that reflected their status as colonies whose purpose was to provide Spain with raw materials and a market for finished commercial goods.³³ Campillo argued that the legal and administrative structure that Spain had erected in America was essentially unworkable. Looking to the French Bourbon system, he suggested that the corrupt regional administrators called corregidores be replaced with Crown-appointed bureaucrats known as intendants. They would gather valuable data about their districts, which administrators would use to design social and economic reforms. Campillo further maintained that people would become more productive if they lived in town settlements rather than in rural areas. He even thought to intervene in church administration, suggesting that many bishoprics were too large to adequately administer to the faithful or oversee the clergy, who had fallen into a state of disastrous disorder. His ideas became the basis of the eighteenth-century Spanish reform agenda known as the Bourbon reforms. Along with similar movements in Portugal, France, and Austria, these focused on gathering useful information that could be used to improve the populace and thereby enrich and empower the state. In the Spanish Empire, they reached their peak under the rule of King Charles III in the 1770s and 1780s—the very time when Martínez Compañón found himself in Peru.

      While the central concepts of the Bourbon reforms were applied throughout the Spanish Empire, the program had a special focus in America. There, it rested largely on Campillo’s assertion that it was “the Indians” who were the “true Indies and the richest mine of the world.” Their labor, purchasing power, and knowledge of the American environment held vast untapped potential, and he recommended that Spanish reformers focus their efforts accordingly. They were to “reduce the Indians to civil life, and treat them with kindness and sweetness; [and] pique their interest in industry, and in this way make them useful vassals and Spaniards.” Campillo suggested that the king send the Peninsula’s most adept thinkers to America, where they would observe the treatment of Indians and file reports about their status. Then they would help to teach Indians about which crops were the most profitable. They should arrange for them to be given land to