Some Contextual Elements

Paraguay’s Jesuit missions were deployed between 1609 and 1768 in an area covering contemporary Paraguay, the north of Argentina, and the south of Brazil. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the missionary complex comprised thirty units and constituted the largest urban space of the region, with a total population of nearly 150,000, or between two and ten thousand individuals per mission. For the sake of comparison, the populations of Asunción and Buenos Aires amounted to no more than ten thousand each. Spaniards were not authorized to enter the missionary space, which, as a result—at least in theory—was of an insular nature. Work there, however, was organized along the European model. It was distributed along social and gender lines and made up of crafts, agriculture, and livestock farming.⁴ It was carried out from Monday through Saturday for about six hours a day, with Sundays being reserved for religious practice and authorized recreation. Every family owned a plot of land, which it cultivated for itself, but everyone worked two days a week in community fields. According to Peramás: “The product of these fields, which was stored in granaries, constituted a public fund for feeding and clothing wards and the sick, boys and girls, as well as widows.”⁵ In other words, it served to support those who were not able to produce their own means of subsistence. So while the missionary ownership regime was supposed to be egalitarian, with everyone having the same properties, in practice certain categories of individuals needed assistance and were considered poorer than the rest.

As stated earlier, references to the poor as needy are scarce in the Jesuit chronicles. The Italian historian Ludovico Muratori (1672–1750) relates the testimony of Gaetano Cattaneo (1696–1733), a missionary in Paraguay, who states that “almost all the Indians are poor” and refers to “funds established to support the poor,” but concludes that even though “the Indians are poor, [they] are wanting in nothing. They preserve among themselves a perfect equality that is that strongest support of union & public tranquility.”⁶ There are a few odd mentions of the material poverty characterizing the non-mission Indians, as when Jesuit Francisco Jarque (1609–91) tells of how the Jesuit missionaries travel to evangelize yet-to-be-converted groups, which, he says, “are so poor that they walk around half-naked and do not a have a decent room” in their house to accommodate the priests.⁷ On the other hand, the term “poor” is used regularly but in an empathetic and paternalistic manner. José Cardiel (1704–82) thus explains that in terms of crops, “since the poor Indian does not think about what needs to last all year, and his mind is extremely lazy, infantile, and uninformed, he is more than happy with the little he might have.”⁸

Despite the lack of direct references to material deprivation in the Jesuit sources, poverty is a phenomenon that punctuated the history of the missions, as attested by the establishment of public stores intended to support what Robert Castel (1933–2013) calls “invalid paupers,” namely widows, the elderly, orphans, and the ill.⁹ There is every reason to believe, however, that these were not the only beneficiaries. While in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the poor were constantly increasing in numbers due to structural changes in the relations of production, in Paraguay’s Jesuit missions, variations in the number of those in poverty were due to circumstantial events such as poor crops, wars, or the pillaging of livestock by the Portuguese and Spaniards or groups of non-converted Indians roaming the countryside. There was no variation in the structure of relations of production in the missions during their century-and-a-half’s existence.¹⁰ Inequalities were supposedly minimal simply because no one there accumulated capital, and private property was practically nonexistent. This idyllic discourse propagated by the missionaries cannot, however, obscure the fact that not everyone was poor to the same extent.¹¹ Although sources written in a European language and intended for a European readership tended to homogenize the relationship between poverty and the Indian missionary population, in a number of documents written in Guaraní for internal use, “poor” was in fact a differentiated category.

These sources include the Luján manuscript, in which such occurrences are given in context, allowing a new approach to the social question in the missions.¹² Identified in 2013 in Luján, Argentina, at the Provincial Museum Complex “Enrique Udaondo,” this 283-page manuscript entirely written in Guaraní was most likely devised by Jesuit missionaries collaborating with educated Indians in the early eighteenth century.¹³ Divided into eighty-eight chapters, all of them referring to the work in Paraguay’s Jesuit missions, the manuscript stages dialogues in a variety of work situations such as carpentry, smithing, farming, husbandry, house construction, yerba mate harvesting, and so on. It also features three distinct segments. The first and third parts (chapters 1 to 23 and 63 to 88) follow the catechism model, where a P indicates a question (pregunta) and an R an answer (respuesta). In the first of these segments, the person asking the question is always a Jesuit. His conversation partner is quite often an Indian official. From chapter 63 to the end of the manuscript, the questions are asked by an Indian official and are answered by a subordinate native Indian. The central part of the manuscript assigns the same roles, but the protagonists are indicated by their first name instead of a P or an R.

The manuscript is in all probability an administrative labor handbook addressed to both the missionaries and the Indian authorities. Although it is neither dated nor signed, the graphics suggest that it was produced in the early eighteenth century, when the Jesuits restructured their linguistic skills, which had thus far been mainly addressed to the religious realm.¹⁴ From this perspective, the Luján manuscript would have been part of an effort by the missionaries to address the administration of temporal goods and to achieve command of the language used by people in their everyday life, particularly at work, and not only at church. Another manuscript, this time in Spanish, confirms the hypothesis according to which in the eighteenth century one of the missions’ core problems was that of supervising work. Dated 1732 and signed by Father Anton Sepp (1655–1733), it offers a series of recommendations on how missionaries newly arrived from Europe were to organize work in the missions. In the manuscript, which broaches the same topics as the Luján manuscript, a passage explains “how the Indians should be distributed in all their chores” in groups of ten and under the supervision of a subordinate authority, a secretario or sobrestante.¹⁵ These latter appear in the second and third segments of the Luján manuscript, at the exact place occupied by the Jesuit in the dialogues of the first segment. It thus seems that the first part could be addressed to the missionaries and the second two to the Indian authorities in charge of supervising work.

This hypothesis is supported by another argument. The chapters of the manuscript are structured along the same model. One of the protagonists embodies exemplarity, the social norm to be followed; he is the Indian official. The other, his subordinate, is often hesitant, sometimes incompetent in his work, sometimes lazy, a liar, or a cheater. His superior’s role in these chapters is to teach him how to do things and to comply with the missionary social order, either through persuasion or threat. The Luján manuscript thus conveys practical information—how to make tiles, how to plow the fields with cows, how to conduct a music lesson, and so on—as well as imparting lessons on Christian morality. It is therefore not surprising to find, in chapter 17, a moral judgment of the behavior of those designated as “poor.” The village corregidor is speaking with the Jesuit missionary about the work to be accomplished that day and explains that many people have eaten the seeds intended for farming.¹⁶ The father then exclaims: “Once again, those who are poor, they have nothing left!”¹⁷

The Poor in Paraguay’s Jesuit Missions

The manuscript, in Guaraní, is full of references to poverty and to the poor, showing that, like in Europe, the social question was a fundamental concern of the authorities. In the first chapter, “Dialogues of All Kinds,” the missionary asks an Indian in charge whether “people are doing [or “helping about”] the fields of those who are poor,” to which the Indian answers that he has informed the caciques,¹⁸ who are seeing to it. In chapter 27, which stages “Peru and Mingura, textile craftsmen, talking to each other,” the poor, this time, are presented as needy. Peru, the workshop foreman, tells his subordinate that “the father [priest] needs cloth/canvas, he wants to give it to those who are poor, and has thus reminded us to weave cloth/canvas, and then, make some efforts,” and later repeats that “there are in town some people needing clothes and then ask the father [priest] for clothes” as a justification for the urgency of the textile work. In chapter 38, where “Chuana and Mbarata insult each other,” the latter tells the former that “even though [she is] very poor, [she] does not eat very much, like a cow, [and] does not increase [her] poverty.” The list is not exhaustive, but it reveals that material poverty was articulated around two elements: food and clothing.¹⁹ A second characteristic brought to light by these examples is the Jesuits’ role in providing assistance in a context of poverty. They are the ones who feed and clothe, and they make a point of doing so. This finding does not fail to recall the contract made between peasants entering serfdom and their lord, worded as follows: “As it is known by all that I have nothing with which to feed and clothe myself, I have solicited your pity and your will has granted to me to be able to give myself over to you or entrust myself to your protection.”²⁰ Though nearly a millennium separates this text from Paraguay’s Jesuit missions, the feudal contract between serfs and their lord thus resembles the pact uniting the Guaranís to the Jesuit missionaries.

The alliance established between the Jesuits and the Guaranís was underpinned by a twofold threat. Slave hunters from Saõ Paulo, in the north, were carrying out raids and capturing thousands of men, women, and children. The Spaniards in the area were coercing them into a system of severe forced labor, the encomienda, the actual conditions of which were close to slavery, but as the system was legal per the Leyes de India (Laws of the Indies), they could not be escaped.²¹ When the crown had asked the Society of Jesus to send missionaries to evangelize the Indian populations because it had not been able to subjugate them through arms, the Jesuits agreed to do so if the Indians who were willing to convert were exempted from the encomienda.²² In addition to this protection from the colonists, the Guaranís in the missions enjoyed more stable and easier access to food, since they had the advantages of large-scale rationalized farming and above all of large quantities of beef.²³

The poor in the missions were therefore those who were not able to feed or clothe themselves through their own means and had to resort to aid. In chapter 56, where a group of Indians travels to Santa Fé, even though the word “poor” is never mentioned, the assistant to the expedition’s leader condemns “those who are lazy and walk around with no clothes and [who] wear very dirty clothing.” He goes on to explain that the others, those who are “very reasonable,” do not “waste their money for nothing, they only give [their money] for their clothing, and they do not lose their money in vain: this way, they all find themselves clothed, and they are lacking in none of the things that they need.” Further on, when returning to their village, they go by a village inhabited by other Indians who are considered threatening (probably Guaykurus from a Franciscan pueblo de Indios [Indian village]), the leader of the expedition orders his men to wear dirty clothes to prevent the other Indians from asking them for anything. In other words, dressing poorly made them look poor, like people who had nothing and from whom nothing could be taken.

A letter dated March 23, 1774 illustrates the link that had been formed between poverty, materialized by the absence of clothes as well as hunger, and disturbance of the social order:

Since the old economic system was changed, the villages have been suffering from an extreme scarcity of everything, and thus, those unfortunate dwellers, pushed by hunger and nudity, escape in flocks, some toward the jurisdiction of Paraguay, others to the confines of Río de la Plata, others to the forests, where their ancestors had lived. The temples and the houses collapse without being restored.²⁴

In 1774, it had been six years since the Society of Jesus had been evicted from the missions it had founded, and these were thenceforth being administered by a member of the secular clergy.²⁵ Peramás thus seized the opportunity to denounce the negligence of the new administrators, who were dooming the missions to ruin, literally. He also highlighted the skills that he considered the Jesuits had employed during the century and a half when the missions were under their responsibility. At that time, according to him, the Indians had not been “unhappy” because they had been wanting in neither clothes nor food. They had therefore not abandoned the villages to escape in disconnected groups or to the Spanish cities. It would have been necessary, he added, “to hold back the Indians in their village, even barefooted, maintain them in the consented discipline, [rather] than, hunger combined with nudity, [for them] to be seen scattered, roaming the fields and the hills to the great destruction of [Christian] customs and with great detriment to their souls.”²⁶

Outside of this case, where the Jesuit underscored the poverty of the missions after the departure of the Society of Jesus, references to the poor thus seemed much more numerous in the sources for internal use, in Guaraní, than in the chronicles or letters written for a European population that did not know the material conditions in the villages. Concern for the poor in the sources in Guaraní shows that poverty was not only present in the missions but that it also threatened the social order. Documents such as the Luján manuscript were intended to prevent poverty through a series of prescriptions of a moral and practical order. Although it may be difficult to know to what extent and how the pre-Colombian Guaraní lexicon incorporated the notions of poverty and material deprivation, the Jesuit dictionaries make it possible to identify the glosses chosen by the missionaries to express their own, European, representations of the poor and of poverty.

Poriahu: The Poor in Guaraní

The Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s (1585–1652) Vocabulario de la lengua guaraní (Vocabulary of the Guaraní language) glosses the word “poor” with poriahu; amyrĩ; ái.²⁷ First of all, ái is an indication of pain, the expression not of a state of material deprivation but rather of compassion toward a person who is suffering.²⁸ The term amyrĩ, glossed with “poor” or “deceased,” belongs to the same category and is described by Montoya as a “word of love,” expressing affection to a third party.²⁹ In contrast, the word poriahu, or mboriahu, which is in fact still in use in contemporary Guaraní, glossed with “poor” in Montoya’s dictionary, encompasses both material deprivation and a state that calls for compassion. Montoya gives it the following translations: “Pity; poverty; grief; misfortune; distress; affliction.”³⁰ Che poriahu would thus mean “I am poor” or “I am distressed,” allowing for some ambiguity between an individual’s material and moral situation.³¹ A pauper is someone who owns nothing and who should be pitied for their miserable condition. In fact, Montoya translates amboporiahu (made up of the first-person-singular prefix a-, the factitive mbo, and the stem poriahu) as “to impoverish someone by taking away his possessions, or by belittling him with words,” here explicitly using the two meanings, material and moral, of poverty.³²

The gloss for poriahu, in which the Jesuit includes a double meaning of the term “poor,” is part of a long social development of the figure of the pauper in Europe. As underscored by Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, “in the early Middle Ages the concept pauper was not understood to refer to a man in need, nor to a slave or serf,” but to an individual in a situation of “dependence.”³³ In addition, according to Georges Duby (1919–96), “between the year 1000 and the mid-twelfth century, there are in the sources sometimes mentions of ‘paupers,’ who were rural. This distinction, however, did not usually carry an economic significance. Its meaning was religious and spiritual.”³⁴ The reference was not, then, to individuals, or even less so to groups of individuals, plunged into poverty, but to those, striding roads and lanes, who had willingly renounced their possessions and who had been persuaded by movements of piety, namely pilgrims, hermits, or crusaders. These poor were for the most part priests from mendicant orders who based their existence on sharing possessions and “personal disappropriation.”³⁵ Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, among others, lived in “a monastic poverty [that] was defined as asceticism, a discipline, an obligation, subordinated to obedience.”³⁶ Founded on the Gospel and patristic literature, in which poverty, a spiritual value, was embedded in an “economy of salvation,” and in which humility was the pillar, whether one was rich or poor, these views considered that “poverty [became] virtue mostly when it proceeded from free choice,” and not necessarily when it was suffered.³⁷

It was not until the thirteenth century that material poverty appeared in the sources as a feature of the poor. “These people,” according to Duby, “do not own enough land to feed themselves, they do not have enough strength to sell, [and] there is a lack of men who would buy their labor.”³⁸ For all that, poverty did not characterize a “class,” or “milieu.” Someone who was poor was someone finding themselves in a “situation characterized by a predisposition or an effective condition of weakness, incapacity, deprivation, and bereft of any personal means to remedy it.” The pauper could not “hold on to his or her natural ‘state,’ that is, acquire, preserve, or recover the instruments or signs [that would allow them to exit poverty], for instance, for the peasant a plow or livestock, and for the craftsman, a tool.”³⁹ And yet this endemic poverty, shared by all, was not perceived as a threat to the social order because “the supervision of rural society [had kept] its vigor,” and poverty could then only “be an accident, and not a state.”⁴⁰ The village, the parish, and the seigneury formed networks of solidarity that prevented the disaffiliation of the most deprived. In other words, in thirteenth-century society, poverty as a sociological reality was circumstantial, not structural, the same as it was in Paraguay’s Jesuit missions. Although a separation arises here between material poverty and religious poverty, the former must not be thought of as detached from Christian religiosity. It was perceived as an “ineluctable fatality” and, like all fatalities, attributed to God’s will. Just like religious poverty, it was therefore regarded “in terms of the divine order.”⁴¹ The gloss of poriahu would then be a medieval representation, where the pauper was one finding themselves in a “state of weakness,” who, “deprived of fortune,” was “humble, [and] whose material, physical, or moral weakness call[ed] for pity.”⁴²

The double meaning of poverty in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay resurfaces in the Jesuit Paulo Restivo’s (1658–1740) Vocabulario de la lengua guaraní, written a century after Montoya’s. In it, the entry “poor and poverty” is glossed with poriahu and tekuarai.⁴³ In the same entry, however, Restivo explains that “poor” can be translated by mba’e eỹmbija, or “to be without possessions,” and tekotevẽvo, or “to be in need.”⁴⁴ Restivo adds that the expression che tyavo, literally “I am in want,” means “I am poor, I am in want of food or clothing,” reaffirming in this way the link between poverty, clothes, and food, and the link between poverty and want.⁴⁵

The entry “miserly, poor,” is glossed in the same way but offers an example that again links poverty to hunger. According to the missionary, mboriahu tetỹrõ oguenoãẽ karuai would mean “hunger leads to all miseries.”⁴⁶ The term poriahu also appears twice in the entry necessitar, “to need”; Restivo glosses ao cheporiahu habete, literally “my great poverty in clothes,” with “clothes that I very much need,” and mboriahuvó, made up of “poor” and the gerundive suffix -vo, by “the needy one.”⁴⁷

Material need was frequently associated with poverty, as much in the Jesuit dictionaries and lexicons as in the Luján manuscript. In the first place, the entry necessidad, “need,” refers to the entry “poverty,” and the entry necessitar, which can be translated as much by “to need” as by “to be in need,” refers to the entry “poor.”⁴⁸ Then, as an example, under the entry “to assist, to help,” Restivo translates “[to help] the need of a pauper” as hecotebẽha reco rupi ame’ẽ, or “I give for [because of] his state of need.”⁴⁹ The word “poor” is therefore translated here as “to be in need,” rather than with the usual gloss, poriahu. In chapter 17 of the Luján manuscript, “those who are poor” are those who “need seeds,” and in chapter 27, which deals with textile work, Pedro the official tells his subordinates that “the father [priest] needs clothes [because] he wants to give them to the poor,” the need for clothes thus being in reality that of the needy. The entry necessitar, finally, raises a problem that goes well beyond the framework of Paraguay’s Jesuit missions. The missionary linguist explains that the Guaranís use two specific terms for “bodily need, such as food, clothing, etc.,” tekuarai and tyavo.⁵⁰ But in the Luján manuscript part, poriahu is in fact the word used most to describe the poor and poverty. This term thus seems in fact to be the one the Jesuits chose for glossing the European term “poor,” which covers both a sociological reality and a spiritual virtue. Nonetheless, this translation choice might suggest that the missionary Indian pauper was perceived only in a positive way. But the sources, whether in Spanish or in Guaraní, show that this was not the case at all, and that the pauper also represented a threat to the social order.

Bad Paupers: The Lazy and the Vagrant

The Jesuits of Paraguay may well have repeatedly mentioned in their chronicles the “poor Indians” who were to be pitied, but they did not also fail to point their finger at their relationship to work. According to the missionaries, laziness, idleness, distraction, childishness, and an inability to plan out tasks or manage the economy were natural to them. Juan de Escandón (1696–1772) lambasted Indian women, whom he considered to be “as lazy and careless (if not wasteful) as them [Indian men], even if in this too there is no rule without exceptions.”⁵¹ Cardiel was just as adamant in affirming that the Indians’ spirit was “lazy, childish, and slovenly.”⁵² Sepp criticized the “absolute laziness” of the Indians, who were nothing more than “lazy farmers,” while Charlevoix lamented “their little foresight, their laziness, and their scarce savings.”⁵³ These were however documents intended for a European public, and they should be judged in the light of the conditions in which they were produced, given that they were written to justify the legitimacy of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, particularly by underscoring the Indians’ inability to administer their villages on their own and lead a Christian life. And yet the sources for internal use, which cannot be suspected of serving as propaganda for the Society of Jesus, say nothing different.

In the dictionaries, laziness is glossed in Guaraní with the term ate’ỹ.⁵⁴ In the Luján manuscript, however, the lazy are designated with the expression iñate’ỹ va’e, made up of the prefix i-, third-person singular or plural, and the suffix va’e, which designates a group of people sharing the same condition. It thus indicates a category of individuals who share the condition of being lazy. These latter were of constant concern to the authorities, whether Jesuit or Indian, who organized and supervised the work. In chapter 17, the alcalde organizes the field work and warns the caciques in charge of supervising the work as follows: “And the caciques who hide their lazy vojas [ovoja iñate’ỹ va’e] will pay for it [will be punished] with them.”⁵⁵ In chapter 20, “Such Are the Words about the Construction of the Village,” the Jesuit asks the Indian official if “all the people rejoice” and “if they did not find any who are lazy.” In chapter 32, where “Chuã, Nave, Sepe, and Mbatia talk together” about several subjects, Sepe orders Mbatia to make sure that the people work and then warns him that “if some men do not come, you get them out of their house, let them work with their fellows, and if some of them are lazy [iñate’ỹ], tell it to the alcalde, so he punishes them!” In chapter 47, an exhortative speech where “the father [priest] talks to the people about the work they have to do,” the missionary asks the caciques to denounce “those who are lazy in order to have them punished!” For the authors of the manuscript, laziness was thus antagonistic to work, and as such, liable to corporal punishment because it harmed production and hence the survival of the missions.

Moreover, laziness pushed individuals to simulate illness, that is, pass themselves off as invalid paupers. Thus in chapter 35, where “Agui and Ruca are speaking gossip,” the first accuses the second of having spread false rumors about him, and more specifically of having called in sick to avoid going to work: “You told him [about me], ‘he doesn’t work.’ You told him, ‘Those who are lazy, when they are lazy, they pretend to be sick.’” Thus laziness, a mortal sin, brings about another, venial, sin, which is lying. It is an offense to both God and the community, as shown in chapter 53, “Sabati and Saro Talk about Blacksmithing.” Here, the first explains to the second the importance of community work in the relationship he maintains with God: “Do not be lazy in your love of God. These are not our own goods [that we are about to craft]. Me, I strive relentlessly for community work.” Laziness would thus lead to the ruin of Christianity as much as to that of the missionary community. The role of the Jesuits, in this context, would be to avert this scourge and by their mere presence incite people to work. In chapter 56, during an expedition to Santa Fé, Basi regrets not traveling in the company of a Jesuit, stating that “men are strong when they walk alongside the father [priest],” and that when the latter is not there, “they reveal their true self too, the men who are weak, and those who behave badly, and those who are lazy, and those who are fearful.”

Another recurrent category antagonistic to work in the chronicles but much more in the Luján manuscript is that of vagrants. It is translated into Guaraní as oguata te’ỹ va’e, that is, literally, “those who walk in vain.”⁵⁶ Cardiel thus explains that children must be educated from a very early age, failing which, and since they are of a “lazy and slovenly temperament […], when they are grown they turn out idlers, footloose, and are the plague of the village.”⁵⁷ In the same way, he justifies the systematic supervision of work in the fields by the fact that, without it, the Indians would “wander about instead of tending to their sowing.”⁵⁸ He also reports their “footloose temperament,” which pushes some to escape the missions and work as day laborers for the Spaniards:

And they do not even stop in a city; after a few months, they go to other ones, one or two hundred leagues away […]. They do not hire themselves out continuously; after working two or three months, they indulge in laziness, and spend right away what they have earned, on drinking and binging, something they learn when they are over there.⁵⁹

Although Cardiel differentiates those Indians who, in the missions, indulge in idleness and laze about instead of working from those who have escaped to the Spanish cities and are no longer under their tutelage, there is also a problem of vagrancy within their missionary space. The Book of Orders also indicates that if “an Indian goes from one village to another with no paper, and no authorization from his priest, he is to be put in jail until the priest is informed, in case he is suspected of vagrancy and idleness.”⁶⁰

The term oguata te’ỹ va’e seems however to refer only to the first case. Thus, when in chapter 18 the caciques are assembled before the authorities to report on the work of the land, they are asked “if there are some who are vagrants” among the workers. In chapter 46, where “Mingura and Sepe talk about their fields,” the first exhorts his vojas to work the land: “Look, you have tall grass [in your fields]. Over there, make the fields, my sons, do not behave any old how, and do not wander off anywhere.” The following chapter, in which “The father [priest] speaks to the people about the work they have to do,” also uses the term oguata te’ỹ va’e. The missionary warns the caciques to “watch over your vojas well, do not have them wandering around, act alongside them in their work, this so they always rejoice with you.”

These two categories, that of the lazy person and that of the vagrant, although presented by the missionaries as part of the Indians’ natural identity, were not specific to the Indians, or even to the American continent. In Europe, another category was always associated with them, that of the “bad pauper.” Starting in the second half of the thirteenth century, when the expansion of cities was combined with periods of scarcity, the structure framing the rural world became weaker, and many impoverished people went looking for work in the urban world.⁶¹ A century later, the black plague, which led to a shortage of labor and hence to higher wages, increased rural depopulation. The numbers, and above all the anonymity of these urban poor—everyone in the rural world had known them—gave rise to the figure of the vagrant. The pauper was seen as dangerous and threatening, “dirty,” “ugly,” “mean,” “despicable [and] despised.”⁶² Moreover, thirteenth-century moralizing literature emphasized the specific vices that would lead to poverty: the poor were purported to be lazy, thieves, inclined to alcoholism, and incapable of managing their own resources.⁶³ This was a nearly identical description of the warning addressed by Basi five hundred years later to the members of his expedition in chapter 56 of the Luján manuscript: “The Indians who are lazy do not eat, they wander around unclothed, and they wear very dirty clothes, and they are drunk […]; they waste their money for nothing on things that are worthless.” Hence the pauper was perceived as a two-faced individual: the virtuous pauper and the bad pauper.

The first group was made up of invalid paupers, who were seen as personifying the suffering Christ: the ill, widows, orphans, and the elderly. The second was formed by able-bodied paupers: those making a living from professional begging and those who could simply not find work. The first, the “good poor,” were eligible for welfare assistance. They were taken into hospitals, and their condition would give them the legitimate right to receive alms. The second, those who refused work or, mostly, could not find any, aroused suspicion among their contemporaries. In fourteenth-century Europe, as the poor were increasing in numbers, many municipalities regulated legal assistance to the poor. The authorities gave the deserving poor badges, which were shown during the distribution of alms.⁶⁴ Although these measures were scarcely efficient in practice and mostly designed to limit the massive inflow into the cities of downgraded peasants, they were already drawing a separation between two categories of paupers, the “good ones” and the “bad ones,” those who had a legitimate right to claim assistance or alms, and the others. Early modern Europe, already split by the Protestant Reformation, was also divided on the question of assistance and charity, which thus far had been the prerogative of the church. The states did not all manage this issue in the same way, but the general trend was to place these people in forced labor for the purpose of re-education and re-integration, since inactivity was what supposedly engendered poverty, which would then be responsible for all vices and social wrongs. The European states developed multiple procedures to keep a close watch on the poor and attest to their invalidity based on papers delivered by the authorities. The division between good and bad pauper was generalized, except in Spain, where the church managed to keep its control over charity institutions and refused to partition the poor. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, all vagrants were subject to checks, and a major census gave way to the issuing, like elsewhere in Europe, of a pauper’s certificate giving the holder the right to assistance.⁶⁵

Thus, when the Luján manuscript mentions the lazy—iñate’ỹ va’e—and vagrants—oguata te’ỹ va’e—it is designating two categories actually reflecting the European “bad pauper” category, more specifically that of able-bodied paupers. The Guaraní categories are thus constructed based on a European category, itself the result of a slow construction process closely linked with the problem of social assistance. Three differences must however be underscored. First, while in Europe it was the condition of being poor that was associated with laziness and vagrancy, in the missions the Indian was their source. The nature of Indians, according to the Jesuits, leaned toward laziness, and work was seen by them as “the greatest punishment.”⁶⁶ Furthermore, in the Luján manuscript at least, the category of the vagrant, glossed with oguata te’ỹ va’e, does not designate its European equivalent—namely those going from town to town and through the countryside seeking day labor—but rather those who indulge in ocio, idleness, understood as antagonistic to work and equivalent to laziness. Finally, the missionary context of Paraguay, with its highly populated villages and Indians recently—or yet to be—converted to Christianity, did not allow the Jesuits to adopt an overly repressive policy toward the poor.

While in Europe the religious or secular public authorities had been trying to apply a twofold system, of repression and of assistance, intended to curb poverty and integrate all of the destitute into the social body, in the missions coercion consisted mainly of corporal punishment by whipping. The Jesuits could not however overdo this, as it would run the risk of seeing the Indians flee into the forest. Assistance, on the other hand, was indispensable for the same reasons. The system put in place by the missionaries through community work deserves a deep examination that is not possible within the limited framework of this article, but suffice it to say here that it differed from the European model, and that like the term poriahu, it did not discriminate between good and bad paupers.⁶⁷ In a Jesuit mission in Paraguay, even though some were vagrants or lazy, all the poor were entitled to benefits.

Conclusion

Poverty in the missions was endemic and shared throughout the entire population. Some groups of individuals were however more vulnerable than others and were designated as “poor.” An examination of the sources shows that the translation of the word in Guaraní, poriahu, encompassed both a religious dimension—Christian virtue—and a material one—poverty and deprivation. Although there were several words in Guaraní that expressed the strictly material aspect of poverty, the missionaries thus chose an accurate translation, re-establishing the polysemy of the Spanish term. This strategy was not without risk, for by opposing in the same single word the humility of the pauper claimed by Christianity to the intensive production ordered by the Jesuits, which alone could avoid the state of poverty, the Jesuits ran the risk of plunging the Indians into confusion. All the same, it reveals the extent to which in Paraguay’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit missions the term was rooted in its European Christian history and the potential of this dual concept for the purposes of evangelization. Not only did it help the Indians understand the imperative of rationalized productive work but it also justified their poverty as divine will.

On the other hand, the term poriahu never seems to have accounted for the dichotomy articulating the distinction between “good” and “bad” paupers. The reason for this may be that in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay, as opposed to Europe, belonging to one or the other of the categories made no difference to their eligibility for assistance. To benefit from food or clothing from the public stores, it was enough to belong officially to a village, that is, to be recognized as such by the authorities, Jesuit or Indian. It was enough to be poor, and deviant behavior did not deprive the members of the group of the same material assistance to which anyone respecting the norm had a right. The reasons for this tolerance were on the one hand purely pragmatic, since such sanctions would have contributed to the disintegration of a Christianized society in which the missionaries had invested a lot of effort, time, and human lives. On the other hand, they came under a medieval legacy still persistent in early modern Spain and under an administration managed solely by a religious order that, while not strictly mendicant, nonetheless considered poverty as an evangelical counsel—the Jesuits, like all religious (mendicant or not), took a vow of poverty. The “bad paupers” were then designated, not as a homogeneous category, but by nouns or adjectives qualifying their behavior as vagrant or lazy. By separating their behavior from their condition of poverty, the Jesuits granted them eligibility for assistance and built a system of charity where, in thirty villages with several thousand inhabitants each, everyone contributed to the alms—through their participation in community work—and everyone was entitled to benefits. This social welfare model, institutionalized by the missions’ legal corpus, was a unique innovation in the history of welfare, at least until the twentieth century.