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The Mission starring Jeremy Irons (as saintly Jesuit) and Robert de Niro (as penitent slaver) is less a movie than it is the illustration of an historical episode, in this case the reduction by force of the Jesuit reductions of the aboriginal tribes of Paraguay, Uruguay and Southern Brazil.
The difference between an historical illustration and a documentary is precisely that -- the former paints a picture, the latter (supposedly) documents causes and effects. As illustrations go, the Mission is well done. It tells the story of how avaricious and resentful Spanish and Portuguese settlors intrigue and connive with royal and ecclesiastical authorities to destroy the semi-autonmous and prosperous colonies the Jesuits had founded in the jungle among the indigenous tribes -- in this case the Guarani. Unfortunately, the illustration delivers the gist of the truth wrapped in false colors. Some documentary style background is required.
From the outset, the settlement of Las Indias was a four-cornered tug of war between Indians, Settlors, Church and Crown. Accepting de facto the inescapable presence of Europeans, the Indians sought to maintain as much autonomy and tradition as possible withing the new macro-political framework. Unfortunately that was pretty much what the Settlors wanted too. The Crown saw the hemisphere as the imperial foundation for the nascent unitary State and the Church saw the New World as a place were Old World Gregorian politics might get a second go around -- in other words, she saw the America's as a chance to hold on to medieval concepts of dual government in which the Chruch was the spiritual sun to the secular authority's moon.
As generalizations applicable to two continents and three centuries go, this is an astonishingly accurate encapsulation. But the "tilt" in the four cornered struggle was that three of the parties agreed that something had to be done with the Indian, whereas the native answer to this question was that preferably nothing needed to be done at all.
The Settlors, of course, saw the Indians as a hinderance to expansion if free and as source of free labor if not free. To this end, they were willing to accept "trusteeship" (encomienda) over the Indian for his supposed protection, edification and welfare. As advocated by the Settlors, the encomienda system treated the New World as a sort of vast geo-political orphanage. In contrast, visionary elements within the Church saw the Indian as Noble Clay out of whom a new breed of man, untainted by European sin, would emerge; and in the 16th century a few genuine utopias were tried. But even apart from such millenarian ideas the Church was opposed to slavery, forced conversions and the settlor's perversion of the econmienda system which she herself had originally proposed in 1516. The Crown was also opposed to encomienda and to the powerful feudal class such a system would necessarily create. It preferred to see the Indians incorporated into society as free, but loyal and productive subjects. The difficulty here, especially in places like Paraguay, was that the aboriginals were not particularly suited in their nobly savage state for participating in a proto-capitalist nation state. In fact they often savagely resisted cooption which only served as asserted justification for slaughter and slave raiding parties by the Settlors.
By the 18th century, the Church had pretty much given up on holding onto the Middle Ages in the New World. Good enough if it co-operated with the Crown. This policy certainly suited the Jesuits who had never particularly been grass-roots guys and who always aimed to rule through the top. The Jesuits convinced authorities in Madrid and Rome to allow them to "reduce" the Guarani and other tribes through pacific means. It was for this reason that the Jesuit missions were called "Reducciones" -- they were conceived less in terms of utopias per se and more in terms of co-opting the natives into the established colonial order.
But what a difference a little peace makes. The very fact that colonization was limited to pacific means -- and hence to show and tell -- tended of its own force to move the whole enterprise in the direction of "utopia". In fact, in another of the endless paradoxes that abound in the history of Spanish America, the reductions tended to revert to the original and idealistic notions behind the encomienda system.
The missions were not utopias of free men and women. They were guided democracies ruled by theocratic overseers working through select Indian caciques. But neither were they simply Jesuit run colonial entrprises geared for protean capitalist production. The agricultural economy of most missions rested on a system of communal property and inelienable land possessions. This was not (as the movie incorrectly implied) the transplanted result of European "communistic" ideas but represented rather a reversion to indigenous economic modes of production which are known in Spanish as ejidos
What the Reductions actually represented was a species of political, economic, relgio-cultural synchretism. This was not a process of "co-equality" but it was a process of mutual influencing and inter-twining. Only that kind of a process could have led to the Guarani Revolt in defense of "their" communities.
With minimal historical licenses, the Mission successfully conveys, if not the historical background, the true historical gist of the Guarani War (1757). The Jesuits did found utopian style missions; the Settlors resented them and manipulating European political issues to their benefit, got the Jesuits expelled and forcibly reduced the reductions....at least some of them.
What I found disappointing in the movie was its failure to capture the syncrhetic center of gravity of the Missions project. What made this more disappointing still was that, in too short a scene, the movie did capture the indo-iberian cultural melding as it manifested itself during an unmistakably "creole" religious festival in the colonial city. In a clever visual device, the scene depicted Europeanized Indians and New World Settlors interlocking in dancing circles to music that was already distinctly "Latino" (as we would say today).
Alas, the movie came up short when it came to illustrating the even deeper socio-cultural fusion taking place in the missions. The hints of indigenous input and authority were far too subtle for the average movie-goer and the overall impression ended up being a distinctly paternalistic, "Look at what the Indian can do." As a result, the movie did not proffer much of an answer to the brutal critique of a Settlor whose unmoved response to a Guarani-sung aria, was "Any animal can be taught tricks." The Missions involved something more than just teaching the natives tricks.
The movie's failure in this regard also spawned the false impression that the Jesuit missions were some kind of progressive political project of the Enlightenment. Jesuits doing Rousseau. In fact, it was the Enlightenment that destroyed the missions. The Settors would have gotten nowhere but for the fact that Portugal's minister, the Marquis de Pompal was a true Son of Voltaire who hated the Jesuits and who, in pursuit of the state supremacy, wanted to see the Church herself reduced to obedient, political prop. It was the Spirit of the Enlightenment (so called) that crushed the Guarani and ran the Jesuits out of Portugues, Spanish and French lands.
All in all, though, the Mission's illustration of an episode did manage to point to the underlying historical tragedy of the Ibero-American experience as an opportunity seen and missed.
The one thing I found impossible was the casting of Jeremy Irons as Fr. Altamarino. Irons is simply to indelibly and thickly English. He can't open his mouth without conjuring up "Tweed and Country". And the worst part of this is that it insinuates the subliminal notion that the English were the Good Guys, whereas in historical fact, of all the scoundrels in las Americas they were the most perfidious.
Marquis de Pompal - Destroyer of Missions
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From the outset, the settlement of Las Indias was a four-cornered tug of war between Indians, Settlors, Church and Crown. Accepting de facto the inescapable presence of Europeans, the Indians sought to maintain as much autonomy and tradition as possible withing the new macro-political framework. Unfortunately that was pretty much what the Settlors wanted too. The Crown saw the hemisphere as the imperial foundation for the nascent unitary State and the Church saw the New World as a place were Old World Gregorian politics might get a second go around -- in other words, she saw the America's as a chance to hold on to medieval concepts of dual government in which the Chruch was the spiritual sun to the secular authority's moon.
As generalizations applicable to two continents and three centuries go, this is an astonishingly accurate encapsulation. But the "tilt" in the four cornered struggle was that three of the parties agreed that something had to be done with the Indian, whereas the native answer to this question was that preferably nothing needed to be done at all.
The Settlors, of course, saw the Indians as a hinderance to expansion if free and as source of free labor if not free. To this end, they were willing to accept "trusteeship" (encomienda) over the Indian for his supposed protection, edification and welfare. As advocated by the Settlors, the encomienda system treated the New World as a sort of vast geo-political orphanage. In contrast, visionary elements within the Church saw the Indian as Noble Clay out of whom a new breed of man, untainted by European sin, would emerge; and in the 16th century a few genuine utopias were tried. But even apart from such millenarian ideas the Church was opposed to slavery, forced conversions and the settlor's perversion of the econmienda system which she herself had originally proposed in 1516. The Crown was also opposed to encomienda and to the powerful feudal class such a system would necessarily create. It preferred to see the Indians incorporated into society as free, but loyal and productive subjects. The difficulty here, especially in places like Paraguay, was that the aboriginals were not particularly suited in their nobly savage state for participating in a proto-capitalist nation state. In fact they often savagely resisted cooption which only served as asserted justification for slaughter and slave raiding parties by the Settlors.
By the 18th century, the Church had pretty much given up on holding onto the Middle Ages in the New World. Good enough if it co-operated with the Crown. This policy certainly suited the Jesuits who had never particularly been grass-roots guys and who always aimed to rule through the top. The Jesuits convinced authorities in Madrid and Rome to allow them to "reduce" the Guarani and other tribes through pacific means. It was for this reason that the Jesuit missions were called "Reducciones" -- they were conceived less in terms of utopias per se and more in terms of co-opting the natives into the established colonial order.
But what a difference a little peace makes. The very fact that colonization was limited to pacific means -- and hence to show and tell -- tended of its own force to move the whole enterprise in the direction of "utopia". In fact, in another of the endless paradoxes that abound in the history of Spanish America, the reductions tended to revert to the original and idealistic notions behind the encomienda system.
The missions were not utopias of free men and women. They were guided democracies ruled by theocratic overseers working through select Indian caciques. But neither were they simply Jesuit run colonial entrprises geared for protean capitalist production. The agricultural economy of most missions rested on a system of communal property and inelienable land possessions. This was not (as the movie incorrectly implied) the transplanted result of European "communistic" ideas but represented rather a reversion to indigenous economic modes of production which are known in Spanish as ejidos
What the Reductions actually represented was a species of political, economic, relgio-cultural synchretism. This was not a process of "co-equality" but it was a process of mutual influencing and inter-twining. Only that kind of a process could have led to the Guarani Revolt in defense of "their" communities.
With minimal historical licenses, the Mission successfully conveys, if not the historical background, the true historical gist of the Guarani War (1757). The Jesuits did found utopian style missions; the Settlors resented them and manipulating European political issues to their benefit, got the Jesuits expelled and forcibly reduced the reductions....at least some of them.
What I found disappointing in the movie was its failure to capture the syncrhetic center of gravity of the Missions project. What made this more disappointing still was that, in too short a scene, the movie did capture the indo-iberian cultural melding as it manifested itself during an unmistakably "creole" religious festival in the colonial city. In a clever visual device, the scene depicted Europeanized Indians and New World Settlors interlocking in dancing circles to music that was already distinctly "Latino" (as we would say today).
Alas, the movie came up short when it came to illustrating the even deeper socio-cultural fusion taking place in the missions. The hints of indigenous input and authority were far too subtle for the average movie-goer and the overall impression ended up being a distinctly paternalistic, "Look at what the Indian can do." As a result, the movie did not proffer much of an answer to the brutal critique of a Settlor whose unmoved response to a Guarani-sung aria, was "Any animal can be taught tricks." The Missions involved something more than just teaching the natives tricks.
The movie's failure in this regard also spawned the false impression that the Jesuit missions were some kind of progressive political project of the Enlightenment. Jesuits doing Rousseau. In fact, it was the Enlightenment that destroyed the missions. The Settors would have gotten nowhere but for the fact that Portugal's minister, the Marquis de Pompal was a true Son of Voltaire who hated the Jesuits and who, in pursuit of the state supremacy, wanted to see the Church herself reduced to obedient, political prop. It was the Spirit of the Enlightenment (so called) that crushed the Guarani and ran the Jesuits out of Portugues, Spanish and French lands.
All in all, though, the Mission's illustration of an episode did manage to point to the underlying historical tragedy of the Ibero-American experience as an opportunity seen and missed.
The one thing I found impossible was the casting of Jeremy Irons as Fr. Altamarino. Irons is simply to indelibly and thickly English. He can't open his mouth without conjuring up "Tweed and Country". And the worst part of this is that it insinuates the subliminal notion that the English were the Good Guys, whereas in historical fact, of all the scoundrels in las Americas they were the most perfidious.
Marquis de Pompal - Destroyer of Missions
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