{
  "id": "ribera-informe-sobre-los-indios-moxos-1788",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Lazaro de Ribera's report to the Audiencia de Charcas on the capacity of the Moxos Indians (1788)",
  "summary": "In a report of 22 February 1788 the governor of Moxos told the Audiencia de Charcas that a Mojo Indian writes the annals of his town on a board or a piece of cane by means of signs, and that a critic who called that barbarous would have called Newton an idiot for writing in strokes. Claims of Indian incapacity, he added in April, are \"una ficcion teatral, fabricada por la tirania o por la necedad\".",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "bolivia",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "indigenous-knowledge",
    "indigenous-rights",
    "colonial-law",
    "human-rights",
    "missions",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "spanish-empire"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "viedma-descripcion-de-santa-cruz-de-la-sierra"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "moxos-y-chiquitos-despues-de-la-expulsion"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protector-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "palafox-virtudes-del-indio"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Did the Mojo people of Bolivia have a system of writing or notation?",
    "What did Spanish officials say about the intellectual capacity of American Indians in the eighteenth century?",
    "What was Lazaro de Ribera's report of 1788?",
    "Who compared an indigenous American notation to Newton's algebra?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The document is a governor's general report to a high court, cited by date. Francisco de Viedma introduces the passage as \"el informe general que dirigio a la Real Audiencia de Charcas con fecha de 22 de Febrero de 1788\" by governor Ribera, and quotes a further passage from \"la adicion de 15 de Abril\". Ribera governed the missions of Moxos and had brought before the same court the evidence of their condition on which a new plan of government was then being built.",
      "sources": [
        "viedma-descripcion-santa-cruz-1836"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The observation itself is about a notation and about who is fit to judge it. \"Un indio Moxo escribe los anales de su pueblo en una tabla o en un pedazo de cana, por medio de varios signos, cuya inteligencia y manejo pide mucha combinacion y una memoria feliz.\" Ribera goes on: there are men who, with no motive or reason beyond not reaching or understanding the ideas of the Indians, \"fallan inmediatamente contra ellos, graduandolos de brutos: y es de admirar el sequito que han tenido sus sentencias\". It moves him to compassion, he writes, to hear them say that the language of the Indians is an incomprehensible gibberish, that they are barbarians, that they note everything down on canes or sticks covered with strokes.",
      "sources": [
        "viedma-descripcion-santa-cruz-1836"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The rebuttal he chooses is the most modern instrument available to him. \"Si uno de estos criticos vergonzantes hubiera visto a Newton, que con el mas y el menos algebraico (que tambien se componen de rayas), se entretenia en calcular el movimiento de los astros para determinar el verdadero sistema del mundo, hubiera dicho tambien que el gran Newton era un idiota, y su analisis un conjunto de garabatos, mas propio para adornar la puerta de un carbonero que para ilustrar el entendimiento humano.\" The argument is that a notation is unreadable to whoever has not learned it, and that illegibility to the observer is a fact about the observer.",
      "sources": [
        "viedma-descripcion-santa-cruz-1836"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The addition of 15 April puts the general claim without hedging: \"Todo cuanto se dice sobre la incapacidad de los indios, su inconstancia e indiferencia, todo es una ficcion teatral, fabricada por la tirania o por la necedad. Los indios Moxos son los vasallos mas habiles, industriosos y fieles que el Rey tiene en sus dominios.\" Ribera closes the passage with an author's apology - the sitters are beyond his brush, \"no es la pintura de estos buenos hombres para un pincel tan debil como el mio\".",
      "sources": [
        "viedma-descripcion-santa-cruz-1836"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The court's own law officer wrote in the same register and to the opposite practical effect, which is why the report matters institutionally rather than as a fine sentiment. Viedma quotes the oidor acting as fiscal, at paragraph 73 of his reply, asking the tribunal to issue whatever provisions its high discernment should find most suitable \"para la reforma de los abusos, buen regimen, fomento y prosperidad de 22,000 vasallos del Rey, humildes, dociles, laboriosos y aptos para las artes y oficios; sin egemplar en su clase, que apenas se conoce\". At paragraph 46 the same official held that the Indians were not in a state to pay the royal tribute, and that this could be established \"cuando tengan mas luces y menos riesgo para el comercio con los espanoles\"; and it is on their supposed incapacity to govern themselves that, in Viedma's account, the Audiencia approved and sustained the plan.",
      "sources": [
        "viedma-descripcion-santa-cruz-1836"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "Viedma's use of the quotation is to turn it against the man who wrote it, and the contradiction is the most instructive thing in the episode. If Ribera says their talents compete in calculation and observation with those of the greatest man of the republic of letters, Viedma argues, it is an extravagant paradox to hold that they cannot understand a trade in which there is no room for deception; and he concludes that the whole object of Ribera \"es el desahogo y felicidad de los indios, y creyendo que solo pende en mudar el gobierno economico de manos eclesiasticas a seculares, deja correr el sistema sin arreglarle a sus justos designios\". The official who defended Mojo capacity in the strongest terms on record designed the regime that, on his critic's showing, went on denying them the use of it.",
      "sources": [
        "viedma-descripcion-santa-cruz-1836"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "That neither man was arguing for anything like self-government should be stated plainly. The question in dispute was who should administer the towns and their produce - Jesuits, parish priests, or lay administrators under the governor - and both sides argued it as a question of tutelage well or badly exercised. Ribera's defence of Mojo ability serves a plan that kept the temporalities in Spanish hands; Viedma's citation of it serves a proposal to erect a new intendancy. The Mojo annalists on whose behalf the sentence about Newton was written are not recorded as having been asked.",
      "sources": [
        "viedma-descripcion-santa-cruz-1836"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "What this entry deliberately does not assert, and why its tier is set below its source. Ribera's report is known here only as quoted by Viedma in a brief written to defeat Ribera's plan; his own manuscript was not opened, the quotations could not be collated against it, and the passages are given as the 1836 printing gives them. Nothing is therefore asserted about the rest of the report, about what the Audiencia or the Council of the Indies replied, or about the Mojo notation itself - its structure, its relation to Andean quipus, and whether any example survives are all outside every source used here, and the description above is one Spanish officer's account of what he had seen done. The volume prints the governor's surname as both Ribera and Rivera.",
      "sources": [
        "viedma-descripcion-santa-cruz-1836"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "The eighteenth-century Spanish American record is usually searched for either administrative cruelty or Enlightenment condescension, and a document that is neither tends to disappear. This one is a serving governor telling a royal court in 1788 that a Mojo Indian keeps his town's annals in signs on a board, that a man who sneers at strokes on a cane would have sneered at Newton's algebra, and that talk of Indian incapacity is a theatrical fiction manufactured by tyranny or by stupidity. It survives because his opponent quoted it at length to embarrass him, and this entry keeps that frame rather than cutting the quotation loose: the same pages carry the crown attorney calling twenty-two thousand of the King's vassals docile and unequalled in the crafts while holding them unfit to pay tribute, and carry the charge that Ribera's own plan left the people he praised owning nothing. The quotation is stronger, not weaker, for being shown inside the argument it was used in.",
  "confidence": 0.75,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-15",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/ribera-informe-sobre-los-indios-moxos-1788",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/ribera-informe-sobre-los-indios-moxos-1788.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Lazaro de Ribera's report to the Audiencia de Charcas on the capacity of the Moxos Indians (1788)",
    "description": "In a report of 22 February 1788 the governor of Moxos told the Audiencia de Charcas that a Mojo Indian writes the annals of his town on a board or a piece of cane by means of signs, and that a critic who called that barbarous would have called Newton an idiot for writing in strokes. Claims of Indian incapacity, he added in April, are \"una ficcion teatral, fabricada por la tirania o por la necedad\".",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/ribera-informe-sobre-los-indios-moxos-1788",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-15",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Descripcion geografica y estadistica de la provincia de Santa Cruz de la Sierra, por D. Francisco de Viedma, su gobernador intendente",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=WNDYGl-VQIgC&pg=PA136"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Lazaro de Ribera's report to the Audiencia de Charcas on the capacity of the Moxos Indians (1788)"
  }
}