Abstract
Multi-scalar archaeological exploration offers new insights for understanding Jesuit estate systems and the slavery they depended on for agroindustrial production. Since 2009, ethnohistorical and archaeological research on two haciendas, San Joseph and San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca, in south coastal Peru’s Ingenio Valley, has illuminated the Jesuit institutions of slavery and the hacienda in colonial Peru. Belonging to two distinct Jesuit institutions, the estates supported schools in Cuzco and Lima, respectively. Since acquiring their first properties in Nasca in 1619, both colleges grew their haciendas by absorbing neighboring fields and noncontiguous lands throughout the region, becoming the largest, most profitable vineyards in the viceroyalty by the time of the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from the Spanish empire in 1767. Both hacienda administrations took similar approaches to property management and the large enslaved population that worked them, negotiating the cosmopolitanism of the communities and balancing obligations for evangelization and Christian discipline with the demands for agroindustrial production.
Introduction
Throughout its global provinces, the Society of Jesus supported its schools, universities, and missions through income from estates, factories, rental properties, and small business ventures that were owned and managed by individual Jesuit institutions, and to a lesser extent through donations and grants. In the case of the colegios (secondary schools) of the Jesuit province of Peru, agroindustrialism, diversely supported by enslaved, tributary, and wage labor, was the primary economic engine that buttressed their works and contributed to an emergent global economy. Chief among their agroindustrial ventures was sugar and wine production.1
For many aspects of these enterprises, especially regarding hacienda labor, there is little or no documentation. Despite the best efforts by scholars using innovative methodologies to access the realities of individuals and groups who only appear at the margins of archival material—including the everyday behaviors and choices of enslaved laborers on Jesuit plantations—historical silences remain. Slavery at the Jesuit haciendas of Peru presents a particular quandary due to the way in which archives have acquired documentation about these estates. The Society of Jesus’s 1767 expulsion from the global Spanish empire created a rift in Jesuit record keeping about its activities in Spanish territories, including missions, educational institutions, and business ventures like the Nasca haciendas. Following the expulsion, the crown established the Junta de Temporalidades to oversee the expropriated properties. While crown documentation is rich, the majority of Jesuit documentation was deemed non-essential and does not survive in the archival record. Archaeology is uniquely situated to address these silences because archaeological methodologies are attuned to reconstruct daily experience from the material results of past human behavior and choice. Extant archival materials, together with the broader scholarship in Jesuit studies, are essential for framing questions about Jesuit political economy, evangelical efforts, and administrative strategies on their agroindustrial enterprises—questions that can be addressed through archaeology.
Since 2009, the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project (pahn) has conducted historical and archaeological research on the colonial and republican haciendas of the Nasca-Palpa region, focusing on the Jesuit estates of San Joseph and San Francisco Xavier.2 pahn employs broad methodologies aimed at exploring daily life among the enslaved workers and residents in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. pahn has carried out archaeogeophysical surveys3 and excavations in the domestic and productive nuclei of San Joseph and San Xavier—both of which are now modern towns. Although principally vineyards for the agroindustrial production of wine and distilled wine-spirits or brandy (aguardiente de uva, today called pisco), both haciendas constituted a noncontiguous estate network of properties in the region. The project conducted archaeological pedestrian survey4 at eleven Jesuit-period annexes throughout the region, and excavations at one annex.
This research seeks to understand how each annex related to the main estate and to the network as a cohesive whole. Properties annexed by both Jesuit schools contributed resources to the estate such as water rights, grazing land, and waystations for transporting produce to Puerto Caballa, the now defunct seaport for the Grande de Nasca and Ingenio Valleys. By the time of the 1767 expulsion, both haciendas had annexes throughout the river drainage—San Xavier with four, and San Joseph nine (Figure 1).
The haciendas of San Joseph de la Nasca and San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca and their annex properties, respectively owned by the Colegio Grande de la Transfiguración of Cuzco and the Colegio Máximo de San Pablo of Lima
Citation: Journal of Jesuit Studies 8, 3 (2021) ; 10.1163/22141332-0803P005
In the mid-eighteenth century, the two Jesuit haciendas in Nasca had a combined enslaved population of Sub-Saharan origin of nearly six hundred.5 These enslaved communities were diverse, cosmopolitan, and multilingual, with individuals from various regions of West and Central Africa and the Americas. These estates offer a case study for the circulation and creation of meaning in the quotidian experience of enslaved subjects within coercive structures. The administration maintained a delicate balance between the regimented order and the necessary privileges of rank, individual autonomy, and opportunities for the expression and production of meaning among the enslaved community.6 This article makes use of extant historical documentation, together with archaeological research, to describe the two Jesuit estate systems’ administration in Nasca. It also outlines a Jesuit strategy of labor as Christian discipline, cultivating enslaved hierarchies and encouraging obedience and regimentation that mirrored the Society’s own structure. The Jesuit hacienda administration shaped enslaved subjectivities and life at the estates, but these top-down processes were limited by the wills, aspirations, and cultural and religious resilience of the diverse enslaved populations at the Nasca haciendas. Within such a context of contestation and structural violence, archaeology elucidates how enslaved actors found modes for expression, maintained and invented cultural traditions, and produced meaning within the hacienda system. Daily life at the Jesuit haciendas of Nasca was the result of mutual negotiation and adaptation for the enslaved and estate administration alike.
Financing the Colleges, Building an Hacienda System
At expulsion, the Jesuits owned ninety-seven estates across sixteen institutions throughout the viceroyalty of Peru.7 Fifteen of these properties were vineyards, and San Joseph and San Francisco Xavier ranked as the two most profitable and highest-valued among these. While sugar estates drew greater incomes, they also had greater expenses in infrastructure and labor. The Colegio Grande of Cuzco was the wealthiest of the Peruvian Jesuit institutions, generating income from fourteen major estates, as well as storehouses, rental properties, a dispensary, and a pharmacy.8 Its two most profitable properties were San Joseph de la Nasca and Pachachaca, a sugar estate in Abancay. While Pachachaca offered a larger gross income (Figure 2), during the expulsion, crown assessors valued San Joseph and its annexes at 256,261 pesos 6 3/8 reales, nearly 29,000 more than Pachachaca.9 This made San Joseph’s hacienda system the most valuable estate network in the viceroyalty of Peru. San Xavier was the fourth most valuable property of the Colegio Máximo de San Pablo in Lima, after three sugar estates. The total value versus profitability of these estates is primarily a function of larger hacienda systems, like San Joseph, having acquired a number of annex properties that contributed resources and infrastructure, and the potential to increase production.
Comparison of the per month average gross income from 1747 through 1765 for the vineyard of San Joseph and the sugar estate of Pachachaca owned by the Colegio Grande of Cuzco. Averages were calculated from totals provided in Cushner, Lords of the Land, 153, Table 6.10; Archivo Regional del Cuzco (arc), Colegio de Ciencias, Leg. 5, Cuad. 6 – 1760–64, fols. 1v, 2r, 7r.
Citation: Journal of Jesuit Studies 8, 3 (2021) ; 10.1163/22141332-0803P005
The procurator, or business manager, was responsible for devising the overarching business strategy and acquiring assets, under the supervision of the college’s rector and the superior provincial. The day-to-day affairs of the individual estates and their annexes were overseen by an administrator, appointed for a period of about five or six years before being rotated to another assignment.10 The acquisition of annex properties was often a strategy devised between the administrator, on the ground, and the procurator at the college. In the post-Jesuit period, original property titles were important for demonstrating the Spanish crown’s ownership of the former Jesuit estates, and thus acquisition strategies for the development of the hacienda networks can be reconstructed. While San Joseph and San Xavier developed together in friendly competition between the Cuzco and Lima colleges, there are some striking differences in strategies.
The Cuzco Jesuits purchased San Joseph in 1619.11 That same year, the Lima Jesuits received their first Nasca property, the Vineyard of San Pablo de la Nasca, later demoted to an annex of San Xavier when they purchased the larger estate in 1657.12 By 1626, San Joseph had begun to annex adjacent properties as they became available, acquiring new lands for planting vines, alfalfa for livestock and usufruct fields for the enslaved workers, and additional water rights.13 In 1632, the Colegio Grande of Cuzco purchased Locchas in the adjacent highlands of Ayacucho, from another Jesuit institution, the Colegio de Huamanga, for grazing San Joseph’s livestock to feed the growing enslaved population. Annexed in 1667, San Joseph’s Estancia de Ocucaje was located in the Ica Valley, over ninety km (55.92 miles) to the north.14 Both colleges continued to acquire and annex properties to their Nasca haciendas until the expulsion. Unlike Locchas and Ocucaje, most of these were located in the Grande de Nasca drainage. While many of these annexes had the potential for future expansion of the principal haciendas viticultural production, most lacked infrastructural development. For example, when in 1739, San Xavier acquired the orchard of the Hacienda Llipata, it was determined that it was more cost effective to rent out the property than to work it.15
Reading the Jesuit titles, together with the 1767 crown inventories and our archaeological survey of these properties, it is possible to understand the aggressive business strategy that the hacienda administrators and college procurators took during the 148-year Jesuit tenure in the region. In particular, pahn’s walkover survey of eleven annexes reveals that investment in built infrastructure was heaviest in the sites closest to the cores of the principal estates of San Joseph and San Xavier.16 This trend is particularly visible at San Joseph’s annex of La Ventilla (where pahn has excavated) and San Xavier’s annex of San Pablo, located near the principal estates in the middle valley of the Ingenio River. Both of these annexes were the only two to feature extensive agroindustrial cores with winepresses, bodegas, and distilleries.
The annexes located in the lower valleys of the Grande Drainage had the least amount of infrastructural investment and very little superficial remains of the colonial occupation could be identified. This is likely due to their use for the exploitation of their natural resources, such as the huarango forests, rather than for agroindustrial purposes, and light infrastructure for the temporary storage of goods and housing muleteers en route to Puerto Caballa was constructed of perishable materials. Most hacienda products seem to have been shipped from this seaport to Lima, where they were sold tax-free to wholesalers who distributed the botijas (amphora jars) of wine and brandy throughout the viceroyalty. Some of the produce also travelled the Camino Real that passed between San Xavier and San Joseph, especially those goods destined for Cuzco and highland markets. These lower-valley properties were also important for sheltering goods received by the estates at the port from Lima.
Slavery as Christian Discipline
Jesuit estates in Latin America have garnered more attention than secular estates from historians and archaeologists alike. For historians, the 1759 Portuguese and 1767 Spanish expulsions of the Society of Jesus generated crown documentation of Jesuit estates and properties and collected a wealth of relevant documents from Jesuit estate administrators, procurators, and superiors. Much of this documentation became important collections in national archives across the region. It has become clear that while Jesuit administrators rotated between haciendas at frequent intervals, and individual administrators had idiosyncratic ideas about estate management, general business philosophies and strategies were shared.17 The relative stability of administrative styles of Jesuit haciendas compared to their secular counterparts make them particularly accessible for archaeological study, as archaeologists often must rely on coarse segments of time in which short-term behaviors are more difficult to detect as distinct events in the archaeological record. Because of the importance of Jesuit estates in historical, and more recently archaeological studies of colonial agroindustrial estates, their uniqueness or exceptionality must be addressed. The question of what can be learned about the daily lived experience of enslaved people by studying Jesuit properties is crucial. Here, I argue that one of the most distinct features of the Jesuit estates of the Peruvian colleges was an adherence to a specific, theologically informed attitude to the management of enslaved labor.
Historical research over several decades has clarified that Jesuit managerial practices and approaches to wine growing, sugar production, ranching, and the production of staple crops were similar to their secular counterparts throughout the Americas, inclusive of regional variations in practice.18 In highland Peru, where many secular estates grew out of early crown grants of Indigenous labor tribute through the institution of encomienda, agricultural labor depended heavily on Indigenous communities. Prosperous Andean Jesuit haciendas, such as the Cuzco Jesuits’ Pachachaca sugar plantation in Abancay, supplemented Indigenous wage labor and retainership with enslaved African labor.19 In the eighteenth century, about twenty-five Indigenous retainers (yanaconas), along with an enslaved population of around one hundred individuals, were permanent workers at Pachachaca. Seasonally, wage laborers (aquilos) came from Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities. Nasca, however, lacked nearby Indigenous communities to draw from and its haciendas had no attached yanaconas. Each estate had large African-descended enslaved communities of around three hundred individuals, whose labor was seasonally supplemented with forasteros, itinerant Indigenous and mestizo wage laborers divorced from Native communities. In this regard, the Nasca estates were more similar to Jesuit sugar plantations in the Brazilian northeast20 than their Andean highland or Mexican counterparts.21 Jesuit properties were also notable on the south coast for their sheer size and complexity vis-à-vis their secular counterparts. Early in the colonial era, secular estate building was slowed due to the lack of Indigenous encomienda labor and reliance on enslaved and wage labor. Spanish colonial inheritance laws inhibited, but did not completely prevent, the multigenerational growth of secular estates. Moreover, Jesuit estates were insulated from the risk of financial strain common among colonial farms in viceregal Peru.22 For these reasons, the Nasca haciendas of San Joseph and San Xavier, with their sizable enslaved populations, represented a significant investment for the Society of Jesus, and one which must be contextualized.
Prior to the strong abolitionist stance taken by Pope Gregory xvi (r.1831–46) in 1839,23 slavery, although historically controversial, played a prominent role in Catholic institutional practice, especially outside of Europe. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Society of Jesus was one of the largest slave owners in the Americas.24 Jesuit generals in Rome found the extraordinary dependence of the Society on slavery polemic to its principal mission—evangelization—ordering superiors provincial in the Americas to reduce their dependence on enslaved labor.25 Early modern Jesuit attitudes toward slavery were complex, supported by moral philosophies, doctrines, and practicalities that dovetailed with dominant secular and theological views of the time. Although there was diversity among Jesuit thinkers, the popular view offered a moral imperative for the Christianization of enslaved Africans and for their “just” treatment.26
Two of the most outspoken voices defending the rights of Africans in the Americas, Alonso de Sandoval (1567–1652) and his disciple, Pedro Claver (1580–1654; canonized in 1888), were prominent Jesuits in the major seventeenth-century slave port of Cartagena, but neither specifically questioned the institution of slavery. In fact, Sandoval himself was educated at San Pablo de Lima, the institution that owned San Xavier, and his treatise on the evangelization of enslaved Africans was inventoried by the crown in 1767 among the books in the hacienda administrator’s office.27 Jesuits who had direct dealings with enslaved people were prone to adopt a pragmatic and economic approach. They believed that “benevolent” treatment was necessary to properly exploit an individual’s work potential, but was also demanded by Christian doctrine. While Jesuit estates worked by enslaved labor provided necessary funding for the colleges, all of the Jesuit enterprises had to be reducible to the only valid reason for the Society of Jesus’s presence in the Americas: the unfolding of “God’s plan” through evangelization.28 The evangelization of the enslaved population was understood as both an opportunity and an obligation. The practical necessities of a disciplined and orderly labor force that turned the wheels of the economic machinery driving the Society of Jesus conveniently dovetailed with the goals of a universal church. Christian labor was disciplined labor, advancing the church’s dominion over the earth and bringing souls into the body of Christ.
From the Jesuit administrative perspective, the subjecthood of the enslaved should be produced through the same tenets of the virtue of obedience to Christ and works performed for the greater glory of God that form the organizing principles for the Society of Jesus. The structure of obedience between superiors and subordinates offered a model for enslaved hierarchy that fostered Christian discipline, enacted through a corporeal prostration in physical labor, which taught both the body and soul obedience to the divine will. Thus, a number of strategies were employed on the haciendas to cultivate obedience and Christian discipline, including, but not limited to: ministering to the spiritual life of the enslaved through catechism and sacraments of baptism and marriage, production of patronage relationships and enslaved hierarchies through material signs and restricted privileges, and an hacienda spatial organization that encouraged self-surveillance. For these reasons, Jesuit slavery differed from slavery on secular estates, factories, and homes; still, corporal punishment was practiced, and the brutality of slavery in colonial Peru cannot be understated in any context. On Jesuit estates, the everyday brutalities of slavery were married to a specific approach to discipline that was necessarily supported by contemporary Jesuit spirituality.
In his recent article in this journal, historian John Tutino notes that “there was no Jesuit exceptionalism in the goal of fusing Christianity, capitalism, slavery. Yet, Jesuits appear exceptionally effective in one critical way. They kept gender balance in their communities of the enslaved.”29 I argue that this singular difference, stemming from a focus on building enslaved Christian communities through the fundamental unit of the Christian family, was transformative of every material aspect of the quotidian, both in production and domesticity for the enslaved community. Adherence to a regimen of prayer, an emphasis on the rosary, and the centrality of the hacienda chapel to daily life were important to approaching slavery through Christian discipline; the emphasis on gender balance and the cultivation of the Christian family via the sacrament of marriage were fundamental, having clear implications for the archaeological record.
Evangelizing the Enslaved
The majority of the enslaved population of San Joseph and San Xavier were criollos, meaning they were African descendants born into slavery in the Americas. Administrative documents list these enslaved criollos as belonged to varying casta (racio-caste) categories other than negro, suggesting mixed ancestry.30 However, since enslaved status passed from mother to child, it can be inferred that fathers of such children may have been free persons of Indigenous, mestizo, or European descent—perhaps visitors or seasonal workers. It is therefore important to recognize that while the enslaved population of the estates was diverse in terms of ancestry beyond Africa, enslaved African-descended mothers played an important role in knowledge acquisition for enslaved children. Of the male population of both haciendas recorded in the 1767 crown inventory, eleven percent (n=33), had casta surnames suggesting they were born in Atlantic Africa. In contrast, enslaved men and women born in the Americas, and most African-born women, were given Christian surnames, masking ancestral ethnic affiliations. The African ethnonyms in this inventory index origins ranging from Senegambia to Congo/ Angola.31 It should, however, be noted that enslaved people originating from the continental interior, as well as eastern or southern Africa, may have also acquired these ethnonyms at Atlantic African ports. The African-born population was religiously diverse: some would have been practitioners of African traditional religions, while others were likely Muslim or Christian—especially those hailing from the Roman Catholic kingdoms of Angola and Congo. This demographic diversity meant that the haciendas of Nasca were cosmopolitan and multilingual, with a population potentially originating from a diversity of religious orientations. While there is some evidence that such diversity was exploited as a divisive tactic for secular estates in the Spanish Americas,32 cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity presented unique challenges for evangelization at Jesuit haciendas.
As noted above, Christianizing discipline and labor were important aspects of a coercive subject-making process aimed at producing a specific type of enslaved worker on Jesuit estates. As an institution, the hacienda marked the enslaved laborers’ experience of space and time, regimenting social, domestic, and work life, and emphasized Christian discipline. However, there is evidence to support a reading of certain spaces and materialized aesthetics as indexing ambivalence to this ordering regime. From the earliest anthropological and archaeological explorations of the African diaspora in the Americas, scholarship has debated whether its cultural history could be primarily categorized by “creolization” or creative emergence of new cultural forms versus the survival of Africanist traditions.33 The Africanness (in its diverse forms) of the African-descended people at the Nasca haciendas cannot be denied in the archaeological record, but neither can their cultural creativity in the face of cosmopolitanism and a coercive labor regime that emphasized religious and cultural conversion.
While enslaved people trafficked from Portuguese ports were to have been baptized, Sandoval cautions that these baptisms were often ineffective at introducing a lasting conversion to Christianity, and most captives coming from outside of the Christian central-African kingdoms had little understanding of the tenets of the faith.34 He thus provides recommendations for baptism and culturally specific catechism by ethnonymic casta, prescriptions that would be carried out on Jesuit estates. The specific application of Sandoval’s instructions was likely highly variable, as Jesuits did not minister to most haciendas. Since most administrators were lay brothers with specific managerial training, they relied on diocesan chaplains or missionaries from other orders. In the case of the Nasca haciendas, both chaplaincies fell under the parish of San Juan Bautista de El Ingenio’s jurisdiction, and priests were often paid for their services with in-kind goods, such as wine or brandy.35 While a traveling chaplain periodically offered the sacraments to the enslaved population, enslaved catechists, musicians, and chapel custodians were appointed to minister spiritually to the community on an everyday basis. Such specialized responsibilities contributed to social differentiation and hierarchy.
Jesuit administrators acknowledged the nuclear family as the most basic unit of Christian society. The central strategy for engineering Christian social organization on Jesuit estates in the Americas included maintaining gender parity among the enslaved population, offering the sacrament of marriage, and encouraging the growth of enslaved families. Both San Joseph and San Xavier sustained a near equal balance of males and females, especially those of reproductive age. As discussed above, this differs from secular estates, where enslaved men typically far outnumbered women. At San Joseph, where ages were recorded for the enslaved individuals listed in the expulsion inventories, 55% of the individuals ages sixteen to fifty were male, while overall 53% were male.36 The crown inventories of the Nasca vineyards reveal barracks-style housing segregated by gender for adolescents and the unmarried, but hint at separate single-family homes for married couples and their children.37 The 2013 excavations carried out at both sites consisted of the controlled archaeological exposure, recovery, and recording of subsurface remains from excavation “units” of various sizes, sampled strategically from a metric grid overlaying the sites. Excavation Unit 6 at San Xavier revealed two possible iterations of a slave dwelling, the first likely built in the mid-seventeenth century, consisting of wood posts and quinche (wattle-and-daub) architecture, roofed with woven reed matting. The floor of the simple structure was compacted earth and clean of artifacts, in comparison to middens associated with enslaved domestic life at San Joseph (Units 8, 9, and 10). Excavations (Unit 8) on a flattened promontory at San Joseph, in the modern community’s residential zone, revealed two domestic adobe structures, with an extensive seventeenth- and eighteenth-century midden located between the two (Figure 7). This midden collected household and kitchen refuse from the surrounding enslaved residences.
In a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century context of this domestic midden at San Joseph (Unit 8, Locus 1299), a single wooden rosary bead was recovered. A 1702 receipt suggests that rosaries were regularly purchased and distributed to enslaved households at San Joseph.38 In the 1630s, Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira (1608–90) working in Brazil contended that Africans lacking Christian discipline could share in the suffering and passion of Christ, becoming more like Christ and transcending physical suffering through prayer—specifically through the rosary and its sorrowful mysteries.39 However, as complex signs, rosaries were also sacred objects that would have been well cared for, as suggested by the presence of the single wooden rosary bead recovered; given the excellent conditions for preservation in the Nasca desert, more beads would be expected in midden contexts had fragile rosary strings been carelessly handled.40
In urban centers throughout the Iberian Americas religious confraternities played an important role in evangelization, establishing hierarchy, social support, and group identity among African descendants.41 By 1620, Lima had fifteen black confraternities, including one with Jesuit sponsorship.42 Most were segregated by casta, but drew together individuals from various households or properties, often cutting across the legal statuses of free and enslaved. These groups organized social and religious activities around patron saints’ and holy days. However, documentation from the Parish of San Juan Bautista, in whose jurisdiction the Jesuit haciendas of Nasca were located, demonstrates that there were no confraternities in the Ingenio Valley.43 Rather, on rural estates, like those of Nasca, enslaved hierarchies and religious feasting would have provided similar opportunities for fellowship and community building as religious confraternities in other regions.
Among the more obvious evangelical tools employed at San Joseph and San Xavier were the spatially dominant and impressive baroque hacienda chapels, the centerpieces of the enslaved communities’ religious life (Figures 3 and 4). Archaeo-geophysical survey, excavation, and historical aerial photography have elucidated larger patterns in the evolution of the spatio-material conditions of the principal estates under Jesuit administration. The configurations of the productive and residential cores controlled movement, use of space, and the experience of productive time in very specific, habitual, and internalizing ways.44 The massive eighteenth-century chapels were centered on the plazas, reinforcing Christian discipline in the spatial and material conditions of the haciendas as constant reminders of the omniscient gaze of the divine. These chapels were built at a scale never seen at secular haciendas and were larger and grander than El Ingenio’s parish church, to which they were technically subservient. The crown inventories detail the sanctuaries’ opulence, with bejeweled and lavishly clothed saint statues, paintings, and gold-leafed ornamentations, extravagant choirs equipped with musical instruments, elaborately carved altars, and well-furnished sacristies.45 While annex properties had their own small chapels, the belfry towers of these principal chapels, over eighteen meters (59.05 ft) tall, were visible from nearby annexes and their bells audible at even greater distances. Plaster sculptural friezes at both chapels embody the polysemy that typified life at the ethnically plural estates—signaling Catholic baroque interpretations of the divine promise of eternal life from death, and simultaneously referencing West African manifestations of the divine (Figure 5). Several sculptural friezes incorporate grapevines and human forms, drawing on classical imagery and northern European Greenman motifs, which from a Western perspective, suggest the heavenly vineyard and resurrection, while simultaneously resonating with West African aesthetics of ancestral communication, the regeneration of life, and rebirth. The structures were indexical of Jesuit prosperity and power, but as instruments for evangelization and the focal point of Christian worship, the chapels materialized the multifaceted administrative strategies discussed above. In the absence of confraternities, the chapels stood not only as organizational architecture on the hacienda landscape, encouraging self-monitoring behavior, but were also emblematic of the estates and the enslaved communities themselves.
Façade of the chapel and plaza of the former Jesuit hacienda San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca, constructed in 1745. Photograph c.1950, prior to the collapse of the towers’ cupolas.
Citation: Journal of Jesuit Studies 8, 3 (2021) ; 10.1163/22141332-0803P005
courtesy of the de la borda familyThe chapel of the former Jesuit hacienda San Joseph de la Nasca, constructed in 1744, amidst the modern town of San José
Citation: Journal of Jesuit Studies 8, 3 (2021) ; 10.1163/22141332-0803P005
Detail of the façade of the chapel of San Xavier. In this plaster frieze a human head emerges from vines, which in West African traditions is suggestive of ancestral communication, the regeneration of life, and rebirth.
Citation: Journal of Jesuit Studies 8, 3 (2021) ; 10.1163/22141332-0803P005
The Materiality of Hacienda Politics
While historian Nicolas Cushner demonstrates that theft and flight were common problems on the estates, he also points out that there was never a violent protest or rebellion at a Jesuit hacienda in Peru.46 Contrasting the Jesuit administration of San Joseph and San Xavier to their post-Jesuit histories offers insights into the special conditions of the former. There were clear differences in administrative styles and attitudes between crown-appointed administrators and their Jesuit predecessors. The crown administration also lacked access to the resources, systems of finance, and credit of the global Jesuit network, which supplied and insulated the Jesuit estates from risk. From legal documents generated in the decades after the Jesuit expulsion, a pattern of increasing discord among the enslaved community emerges. A number of crown-imposed administrative changes interrupted prevailing customs in family life, foodways, and religious obligations.47 These tensions eventually climaxed in 1819 when thirty-four people fled San Xavier to seek the crown’s justice in Lima,48 and a violent uprising at the same hacienda in 1827,49 when the estate’s administrator appointed by the young Republic of Peru’s Ministry of Hacienda was killed by an enslaved assailant. Conversely, lack in the archaeological visibility of resistance should not be confused with complacency. There is ample evidence that daily life was the result of a finely negotiated balance, one in which the enslaved sought power to control certain aspects of their lives within the hacienda’s coercive structuring regime.
A 1711 ruling from the superior provincial on a dispute between the administrators of San Joseph and San Xavier over water rights offers insight into hacienda politics and Jesuit fears about enslaved rebellion. In 1703, the administrator of San Joseph, Brother Diego Murga (dates unknown), took issue with San Xavier administrator Brother Ignacio Vengoa’s (dates unknown) new irrigation ditch that bypassed San Joseph, raising a dispute that was not fully resolved by superiors until 1712. A final judgement by Provincial Luís de Andrade (in office 1707–13) demanded that the estates share the water in twelve-hour shifts. Most substantially, Andrade’s orders prohibited San Joseph’s enslaved residents from maintaining fields to supplement their own subsistence at the western end of San Joseph, just upriver from San Xavier’s fields. Andrade argued that such fields used water left over from irrigating the estate’s vineyards and prevented sufficient water from being returned to the river for use by San Xavier. Instead, Andrade ordered San Joseph to use the maize grown in its fields explicitly for slave consumption and to save water by only growing enough alfalfa for the necessities of the livestock.
Both estates had a long tradition of granting usufruct subsistence fields to the enslaved and denying these privileges would have certainly caused problems for either administrator. Murga promptly wrote a formal request to Andrade, pleading to reconsider his order regarding the usufruct fields:
The blacks see [this action] as the loss of their hacienda and that which contains them, especially when they had never before heard from the superiors [of the Jesuits]. Before, they have been mortified and as if reprimanded, they anticipate and work as if converted to criminals, for that which to them was sworn as a matter of thanks [has been taken]: seeing it as precious, to freely work their own lands; and the blacks, dispossessed of their little fields that so much entertained them during feasts, which gave them some relief in their needs. I say again, it is possible that they will be contained. So much would be the grace of God and virtue of obedience.50
While the disputes over water management seem to have been resolved, the fate of these fields remains an issue of speculation. Such a change in administrative policy would have complicated Murga’s relationship with the enslaved population, and dramatically affected life on the estate. Murga refers to the fields as “that which contains them,” something that satiated the needs of the enslaved and from the administrator’s perspective, offered a sense of freedom in captivity. Implicit is the potential for open resistance, introducing the possibility that the enslaved community might not be contained if they were not given what had been promised to them. In this way, the brother’s letter to his superior is strategic, drawing upon pervasive fears of a black rebellion, but probably substantiated by tenuous structures of hacienda life. The social order was contingent on maintaining hierarchies and systems of rewards and privileges, rather than an overt threat of punishment. Although documentary evidence does not exist, it is likely a compromise was reached, allowing high-ranking enslaved individuals parcels of land or gardens for their own subsistence, given that dietary needs could not have been met by the estate alone, and that such usufruct fields were common on Jesuit estates.
Power, Space, and Daily Life
The everyday materials in the archaeological record used by enslaved people point to activities, behaviors, and attitudes—even contested meanings.51 While the hacienda spaces maintained conceptual distinctions between religious, productive, and residential zones, in practice, domestic and productive activities were habitually intertwined. Excavations at both hacienda cores have found that domestic waste was discarded in communal middens disassociated from particular kitchens or households. Attracting trash from nearby activity areas, often middens contained both domestic and agroindustrial refuse, in thin alternating strata. Domestic discard is characterized by kitchen refuse of faunal and botanical material, glassware, sherds of majolica and coarse earthenware cooking vessels, and lenses of dark ash from the hearth or an attempt to burn organics. Agroindustrial waste is predominantly characterized through discarded botija sherds—remnants of the earthenware amphora used for transporting the estates’ wine and brandy—as well as coarse minerals, wood scraps, and metal hardware. These midden spaces demonstrate the entangled nature of conceptually distinct activities.
San Joseph’s usufruct fields, discussed above, were located at the annex of Tambo del Inga, today known as La Legua (Figure 6), situated between the modern-day towns of San José and San Javier. Unfortunately, the site was bulldozed around the 1950s, and archaeological surface surveys did not reveal significant evidence for its colonial occupation. However, Tambo’s proximity to both estates, together with Murga’s description, suggests that the annex was a space outside of the direct surveillance of the hacienda administration, and potentially a meeting space for members of both haciendas’ enslaved communities. The specific activities that may have occurred in this semi-autonomous space, including feasting events, can only be speculated. However, there is ample zooarchaeological and paleoethnobotanical evidence to demonstrate that the enslaved communities incorporated self-provisioning into their foodways practices, presumably into the late eighteenth century.52 Both archaeological and documentary evidence agrees that caprines—sheep and goats—supplied by the administration were the chief source of protein for enslaved inhabitants. However, zooarchaeological analysis shows that meat provisions were supplemented with the rearing of chickens, hunting of wild birds, and exchanging for marine resources. Paleoethnobotanical analysis supports the hypothesis that a large portion of the enslaved diet was provisioned as rations. Maize, lentils, and wheat, grown at annexes, were staples of the haciendas’ granaries and storehouses. However, supplements from gardens and usufruct fields offered variety by reproducing some Atlantic African flavors: heat from New World cultigens like chili peppers, and texture from squash. The archaeological results demonstrate a consistency with patterns of enslaved foodways that indicate a preference for stews and expedient one-pot meals, recreating African foods through creative means.
View of the fields at La Legua, the former enslaved usufruct fields of San Joseph, located at the annex Tambo del Inga. All above-ground archaeological material was bulldozed in the mid-twentieth century.
Citation: Journal of Jesuit Studies 8, 3 (2021) ; 10.1163/22141332-0803P005
An enslaved domestic midden between adobe structures at Locus 1276 of Excavation Unit 8, San Joseph
Citation: Journal of Jesuit Studies 8, 3 (2021) ; 10.1163/22141332-0803P005
Jesuit-era domestic midden contexts demonstrate that the enslaved community had access to high-quality majolica serving wares and glassware provisioned by the estate. Tin-enameled wares (such as majolica) were probably purchased in bulk by the Jesuit schools and distributed to many of their properties. Gifting such luxury goods was likely viewed by the administrators and procurators as an important symbolic gesture that ingratiated them with the enslaved laborers. The numerous botija sherds found within these same midden contexts could also suggest this patronage relationship, as estate records indicate that both haciendas gifted large amounts of low-quality wine to the enslaved.
The middens also include materials that hint at how enslaved people produced meaning and memory. These assemblages make up a material archive: a record complementary to documentary sources but authored by those who did not produce a written record. Personal objects like tobacco pipes and musical instruments, and industrial products, such as decorated wine amphora or ceramic tools offer clues to how hacienda residents drew on the memory of the experiences of their African ancestors. For example, from the 1767 crown inventories we know that European baroque music was an important aspect of religious devotion, as indicated by the musical instruments in the churches’ choirs and the dedicated practice room at San Xavier. But archaeology also suggests that African musical aesthetics and rhythms were integral to feasting, and perhaps even productive activities. A güiro rasping instrument, made of a dried gourd, was recovered near the ceramic kilns at San Joseph. As industrial products, the botijas produced by enslaved potters emerge from a long Mediterranean tradition, but the decorative motifs employed on ceramics’ exteriors resonate with Atlantic African ritual ceramic traditions, and for some, may have encoded memory of a distant homeland. Similarly, the setters, ceramic tools made by the enslaved potters and used to keep these jars upright, exhibit a range of individuality in their deployment of African ceramic aesthetics.
Final Considerations
The Jesuit haciendas of Nasca were institutions that limited the ways in which enslaved actors could negotiate or express themselves. Even so, they actively sought certain liberties and forms of expression. In addition to the archaeological evidence demonstrating that they participated in gardening and raising animals to supplement food supplied by the administrators, the enslaved also integrated sub-Saharan signs into the politics of the hacienda. On one hand, the structure of production coupled with administrative strategies that imagined slavery as a form of Christian discipline, and the nurturing of enslaved familial units, forged a particular type of enslaved subject. As is evident in the material conditions of daily life on these estates, hierarchy, obedience, and the activities of production penetrated every aspect of agricultural, industrial, and domestic tasks. Yet, these same material conditions made strategies for asserting cultural, communal, and individual agency visible. Enslaved residents complemented hacienda provisions with goods they produced themselves or acquired through exchange. This is visible through slave-made and slave-purchased ceramics, as well as the creative use of self-provisioned food goods. While administrative provisions index the subordination and indebtedness of the enslaved subjects to the estate, the incorporation of self-provisioned goods reinforced the autonomy of the enslaved, both real and perceived. The archaeological record demonstrates that the spatio-material conditions of these estates conformed to a Jesuit ideology of labor through Christian discipline. Still, from these same spaces and materials it is possible to glean evidence for the import of usufruct lands, and how both administrative and self-provisioning were integral components of the administrative agenda. The tenuous balance in the haciendas was not characterized by object domination nor was there total resistance, but rather a unique subjectivity, informed as much by Jesuit strategies as by enslaved politics and meaning making practices.
For an historical survey of Jesuit estates in Peru, see Nicholas Cushner, Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine, and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru, 1600–1767 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1980).
Brendan J. M. Weaver, “Perspectivas para el desarrollo de una arqueología de la diáspora africana en el Perú: Resultados preliminares del Proyecto Arqueológico Haciendas de Nasca,” Allpanchis 80 (2016): 85–120.
Archaeogeophysical survey offers a non-invasive method for detecting archaeological deposits up to several meters below the ground surface. These methods allow for targeted excavations of specific anomalies and often reveal patterns across a site’s landscape. They also save time, conserve research budgets, and have less of an impact on modern populations.
Pedestrian (or walkover) surveys systematically record all archaeological evidence and extant historical architecture on the surface of the sites. These observations are crucial for assessing the potential for subsurface archaeological deposits, site preservation, and evidence for broader landscapes.
The crown inventories of 1767 record 278 enslaved persons at San Joseph and 306 at San Xavier. “Testimonio de la hacienda San Joseph de Nasca,” 1767. Archivo Nacional de Chile (anc), vol. 344, #17, fols. 275v–279r; “Verdadero testimonio de la hacienda de viña nombrada San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca, Yca,” 1767. anc, vol. 344, #16, fols. 246v–252v.
Brendan J. M. Weaver, Lizette A. Muñoz, and Karen Durand, “Supplies, Status, and Slavery: The Contested Aesthetics of Provisioning at the Jesuit Haciendas of Nasca,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23, no. 4 (2019): 1011–38.
Pablo Macera, Instrucciones para el manejo de las haciendas jesuitas del Perú (ss. XVI–XVIII) (Lima: Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, 1966), Cuadro i.
Archivo Regional del Cuzco (arc), Colegio de Ciencias, Leg. 5, Cuad. 6 – 1760–64, fol. 7r.
Macera, Instrucciones, Cuadro i.
Cushner, Lords of the Land, 78.
“Memoria y apuntos por donde severa el derecho que el Colegio de la Compañía de Jesús tiene a las tierras y viña de la hazienda nombrada San Joseph…,” 1644. Archivo General de la Nación del Perú (agn), tp, Leg. 8, C. 165.
San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca’s property title contains the chain of title for the Viña de San Pablo de la Nasca. “Títulos de la hacienda San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca…,” agn, tp, Leg. 9, C. 216.
For an extended discussion of these annexations by San Joseph, see Brendan J. M. Weaver, “‘Fruit of the Vine, Work of Human Hands’: An Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Slavery on the Jesuit Wine Haciendas of Nasca, Peru” (unpublished diss., Vanderbilt University, 2015), 74.
“Títulos de la estancia y tierras de Ocucaje…,” 1677. agn, tp, Leg. 11, C. 251.
“Títulos de la hacienda denominada Llipata…,” 1739. agn, tp, Leg. 10, C. 222.
Weaver, “Fruit of the Vine,” 183–252.
In the previous issue of this journal, a Jesuit instruction manual for hacienda administrators of New Spain was analyzed by historian John Tutino, “Capitalism, Christianity, and Slavery: Jesuits in New Spain, 1572–1767,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): 11–36, doi:
For an archaeological comparison of smaller-scale secular wine producers in the south coastal Peru’s Moquegua region, see Prudence M. Rice, Vintage Moquegua: History, Wine, and Archaeology on a Colonial Peruvian Periphery (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).
Jorge Polo y la Borda, “La hacienda Pachachaca (segunda ruta) del s. xviii,” Histórica (Lima) 1 (1977): 223–47, here 233–38.
See Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
See John Tutino, The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Katherine Moore McAllen, “Jesuit Winemaking and Art Production in Northern New Spain,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 6, no. 2 (2019): 294–314, doi:
There were advantages for the behemoth Jesuit vineyards versus a mid-sized secular estate. In 1706, San Joseph annexed the Hacienda La Ventilla, the family estate of Captain Hernando de Alarcón, for 10,000 pesos less than the heirs’ asking price of 30,000, due to an economic downturn around the time of Alarcón’s death in 1703. “Títulos de la hacienda La Ventilla…,” 1706. agn, tp, Leg. 21, C. 415; see also Cushner, Lords of the Land, 46.
Gregory xvi’s papal bull In supremo apostolatus unambiguously condemned slavery and human trafficking. See John England and William George Read, Apostolic Letter of our most holy lord Gregory XVI, by divine providence, pope: Concerning the not carrying on the trade in negroes (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1844), vii–xi.
The Society of Jesus held at least 17,600 enslaved people in Spanish South America and Brazil, with sizable populations in New Spain, the Caribbean and French territories as well. See Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 524.
Jeffery Klaiber, Los jesuitas en América Latina, 1549–2000: 450 años de inculturación, defensa de los derechos humanos y testimonio profético (Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 2007), 8–9.
See David G. Sweet, “Black Robes and ‘Black Destiny’: Jesuit Views of African Slavery in 17th-Century Latin America,” Revista de historia de América 86 (1978): 87–133.
“Verdadero testimonio,” 1767. anc, vol. 344, #16, fol. 239r.
Francisco de Borja Medina, “El esclavo: ¿Bien mueble o persona?; Algunas observaciones sobre la evangelización del negro en las haciendas jesuíticas,” in Esclavitud, economía y evangelización: Las haciendas jesuitas en la América virreinal, ed. Susana Negro and Manuel M. Marzal (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2005): 83–122, here 93.
Tutino, “Capitalism, Christianity, and Slavery,” 36.
For example, among the enslaved acquired by San Joseph in the 1706 annexing of La Ventilla were five zambos (mixed African and Indigenous ancestry), two mulatos (mixed European and African descent), six negros criollos (Africans born in the Americas), and four negros (African-born). These included nine men and five women aged teens through 60s. “Titulos…”, 1706. agn tp Leg. 21, C. 415.
These are Angola, Canga, Carabalí, Chala, Chocó, Congo, Mandinga, Mina, Popo, Terranova/Lucumí and Uringa. See Weaver, “‘Fruit of the Vine,” 110–13.
See for example, Lynne Guitar, “Boiling It Down: Slavery on the First Commercial Sugarcane Ingenios in the Americas (Hispaniola, 1530–45),” in Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jane G. Landers and Barry M. Robinson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006): 39–82.
See a summary of the scholarly legacy in African diaspora anthropology of the debate between Heskovits and Frazier in Kevin A. Yelvington, “The Anthropology of Afro–Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Dimensions,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 227–60.
Alonso de Sandoval, Un tratado sobre la esclavitud, ed. Eriqueta Vila Vilar (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987 [1627]).
See Sandra Negro, “Arquitectura, poder y esclavitud en las haciendas jesuitas de la Nasca en el Perú,” in Esclavitud, economía y evangelización, 449–92, here 465. There are also instances where chaplains and others were paid in pesos, such as in 1702 at San Joseph. “Gasto de la hacienda,” 1702–8. agn, C–13, L. 128, C. 1, fol. 2r.
“Testimonio de la hacienda San Joseph de Nasca,” 1767. Archivo Nacional de Chile (anc), vol. 344, #17, fols. 275v–279r.
The 1767 inventory of San Joseph specifically lists private housing for the two caporales (chief slaves) and their families. “Testimonio…,” 1767. anc, vol. 344, #17, fol. 273r.
“Cuentas de la hacienda San José de la Nazca y del oficio del colegio del Cuzco, correspondientes a los años 1702 y 1708, realizadas por José Ranzón y Juan Blanco,” 1702–8. agn, C–13, Leg. 128, C. 1, fol. 1v.
See Sweet, “Black Robes,” 107–9.
Elsewhere, I make the argument that rosaries together with other gifted material culture form a crucial part of the political aesthetic of the haciendas. See Weaver et al., “Supplies, Status, and Slavery.”
Among others, see Karen B. Graubart, “‘So color de una cofradía’: Catholic Confraternities and the Development of Afro-Peruvian Ethnicities in Early Colonial Peru,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 33, no. 1 (2012): 43–64.
Patricia A. Mulvey and Barry A. Crouch, “Black Solidarity: A Comparative Perspective on Slave Solidarities in Latin America,” in Manipulating the Saints: Religious Brotherhoods and Social Integration in Postconquest Latin America, ed. Albert Meyers and Diane Elizabeth Hopkins (Hamburg: Wayasbah, 1988): 51–65, here 59.
“Ica, autos que presenta el cura Tomas Aviles…,” 1773. Archivo Histórico Arzobispal de Lima (ahal). Sección Curatos. Leg. 22–I, fols. 4v, 11r.
Similar patterns of discipline at an Argentine Jesuit mission are noted in Beatriz E. Rovira “Arqueología histórica del conjunto jesuítico de Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, Provincia de Misiones” (unpublished PhD diss., Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 1989).
“Verdadero testimonio…,” 1767. anc, vol. 344, #16, fols. 233r–237r. “Testimonio…,” 1767. anc, vol. 344, #17, fols. 265r–267r.
See Cushner, Lords of the Land, 100.
For example, in 1767, all free blacks were expelled from the lands of the former Jesuit estates in Nasca, negatively affecting social dynamics among the community. “Despacho y demás,” 1767. agn, C–13, Leg. 62A, C. 5, fols. 7v–8r. pahn excavations also demonstrate a dramatic material disruption occurred in the late eighteenth century as goods (such as majolica serving vessels) once plentiful were difficult to procure.
“Autos que se siguieron,” 1819. agn, C–13, Leg. 70, C. 3.
“Miguel Bernales, administrador,” 1827. agn, C–13, Leg. 70, C. 18.
Author’s translation. “Cartas,” 1705. agn, tp, Leg. 31, C. 600, anexo 08. The copy of the archived letter is incomplete and undated. I attribute the letter to Murga, based on its content, and place the letter between the end of May and August of 1711.
Elsewhere, I explore, using pragmatism and post-structural theory, how these specific materials represent cultural communication and political contestation. Brendan J. M. Weaver, “Rethinking the Political Economy of Slavery: The Hacienda Aesthetic at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca, Peru,” Post-Medieval Archaeology 52, no. 1 (2018): 117–33; Weaver, “Archaeology of the Aesthetic: Slavery and Politics at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca,” Cambrige Archaeological Journal 31, no. 1 (2021): 111–28, doi:
See Weaver et al., “Supplies, Status, and Slavery.”
