The Jesuit Reducciones

Last week a big group of us are travelled to the Jesuit reducciones in Eastern Bolivia. If you have seen the movie The Mission, you know what they are. They were an experiment in community established by the Jesuits partly as a way to protect the indigenous of the region from the horrible violence and enslavement perpetrated by the Spanish conquistadors.

They were successful early experiements in socialism that worked until the Spanish king, feeling threatened by the power that organized indigenous folks had (and the Jesuits armed them as well), kicked the Jesuits out of South America. The reducciones in Paraguay are in ruins today, but the ones in Bolivia have been preserved and are still functioning towns, with vestiges of their founding principles still present.

The most interesting thing to me about the reducciones is that apparently, according to an article I am reading by the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, the reducciones influenced the thinking of Marx, whose writings appeared somewhat after the Jesuits were thrown out of South America. When I was reading Marx, Engles, and Lenin in university, I never saw the Jesuits mentioned, but I am sure all three would have been embarrassed to admit that some Catholics influenced them, since they had no use for religion.

What is interesting about this is that the birthplace of modern socialism is not Europe, but South America, and that it was not designed according to scientific principles, but in fidelity to the Gospel.

My own pilgrimage to the Jesuit reducciones was exhausting but worthwhile. We visited 6 different missions, all built in the later 17th or early 18th century. The Bolivian missions were the last of the reducciones to be built and were functioning as part of the Jesuit experiments for only about 75 years before the Spanish king became jealous and kicked the Jesuits out. But the Bolivian missions remained active even after the Jesuits were expelled and are still functioning villages.

A Swiss architect came here in the 1970s to begin restoration work on the Bolivian missions, all of which were functioning but in poor repair. The restorations were finished in the late 90s. In the process of restoring them, this architect found the music archives. Some of the Jesuit missionaries were also composers, some of them well-known in Europe. They composed music in the reducciones, taught the indigenous to compose, perform it, and even to craft their own instruments.

The music archive, which is now housed in the basement of one of these churches, contain 5000 original pieces of music that were previously thought lost. According to the story, this architect found it in the bathroom. They are painstakingly restoring and cataloging each piece of music, and have finished with 1700 of them.

The choirs in the missions are still performing these pieces of Baroque music. We went to a concert and were awestruck. There we were, in the middle of nowhere, in a village of no more than 3000 people, and listening to a choir of local children singing Baroque music like I had never heard it performed. Some of the pieces were written in the native Chicitania or Guarani languages.

There are so many interesting things to tell about these missions, but I will restrain myself and just mention a few more. Over 100,000 native people were housed in the reducciones at their height. The native people of this region were nomadic, but willingly moved to the reducciones to escape the slavehunters, who were capturing them to work in the Bolivian silver mines. The silver was all sent back to the Spanish crown. Slaves from Africa were also imported for this work, but the story goes that most of them died, which is why there are so few Afro-Bolivians today.

The reducciones were idyllic communities in many ways. Community members worked 6 days per week--three days on communal land and three days on their own. Communal land was used to grow the herb tea they exported in order to pay their taxes to the Spanish crown. When the head of household died, the private land reverted back to the community for redistribution. In this way no-one was able to to inherit wealth and all had what they needed. It seems that often when poor people are empowered, the elite became concerned about their own wealth and put a stop to it.