Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and cacao, warehouses for the export of silver and the import of wine
and slaves, wool-weaving shops, teams of mules for transport, and
rental properties in both rural and urban zones. As important economic
entities, these religious estates also owned African slaves: The Jesuits
were the largest slaveholders in Argentina.
The missionary orders in Latin America, therefore, were well sup-
ported and wielded considerable temporal as well as spiritual power,
attracting no small degree of envy. Their economic assets bothered
many merchants and landowners who had to compete either with the
missionaries for labor and markets or with each other for scarce church
finances. Merchants at the city of Asunción resented paying taxes on
the transport of their
yerbamate,
while Jesuit missionaries sent bundles
of
yerba
leaves tax-free down the Paraná River to Santa Fe and Buenos
Aires.
In theory, public officials intended for Christianity to bind together
a fractured and heterogeneous colonial society, providing a common
element to the governors and the governed, the privileged and the
dispossessed, the rich and the poor. Certainly, the Jesuits understood
something about power over subject peoples. They built churches in
villages, directed the Indians' work, and tried to keep other Spaniards
away. They learned native languages in order to preach among indige-
nous groups. But the friars never accepted natives into their mendicant
orders as priests, because they did not consider the Indians to be their
equals. They preached instead the doctrine that their long-suffering
Indian subjects would receive rewards later, in heaven. Thus, Catholic
orthodoxy was a mechanism of social control, and religious instruction
prepared Indians and the poor to accept their permanently subordinate
role in colonial society.
Slavery
Slavery in colonial Argentina differed from slavery in other parts
of Latin America, such as Brazil and the Caribbean islands, which
demanded huge numbers of African slave workers. Colonial Brazil,
for example, imported as many as 2.5 million Africans in the 18th
century to work as cane cutters on sugar plantations under brutal
conditions, as well as thousands more to provide the mine labor
required by a gold rush. Consequently, black Africans and native-
born blacks of African ancestry came to outnumber whites in several
Latin American colonies, especially those with sugar and gold mining
economies. By contrast, colonial slave owners in the Río de la Plata
