The method of the Querétaro missions: a mission rule the friars wrote themselves, printed with its own indictment
The apostolic college of the Santa Cruz de Querétaro governed its mission pueblos by a method its own missionaries agreed among themselves in 1767 and reported to the viceroy in 1772: bells at sunrise, doctrine in Castilian, the friar as physician and as advocate against the Spaniards who lived in the pueblo, and an annual election of the pueblo's governor by consultation of all. The same reports say the Indians were badly instructed and the individual sowings barely helped them.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the northern Franciscan missions run on architecture, baptism counts and the argument about coercion, and they cite the mission rule at second or third hand. This object prints the rule from the sheets that carry it: the sunrise bell and the mador, doctrine and confession in Castilian rather than in the mission language, harps and violins with four to six Indian singers, the friar as the pueblo's only apothecary, the annual election of the governor "á consulta de todo el Pueblo", the communal milpa and the yoked oxen lent from the common stock and taken back. It is worth reading because the same document convicts itself - the missionaries tell the viceroy that in the visita pueblos only baptism distinguishes the Indians from gentiles, that the individual sowings barely help them, and that the people they must be defended against are the Spaniards living in their own towns - and because it ends with the college handing missions back and saying why.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The account here is the college's own. The title page of the second part of the Crónica seráfica y apostólica del Colegio de Propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro en la Nueva España names its author as Fr. Juan Domingo Arricivita, "Predicador Apostólico, ex-Prefecto, y Comisario habitual de las Misiones, Escritor Titular del Seminario, y su mas afecto Hijo", and its imprint as "EN MEXICO: Por Don Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, año de 1792". An officer of the institution wrote its history.
The rule was not handed down from Madrid. The chronicle quotes the informes the missionaries made to the viceroy in 1772, and the missionaries speak in the first person: "Los Misioneros que el año de sesenta y siete fuimos mandados para la administracion de estas Doctrinas, nos convenimos en establecer el método y costumbres siguientes." The method was an agreement among the men who had to work it, reported upward four years later.
The day it prescribes is exact. At sunrise the bells call to Mass; an old Indian "que vulgarmente llaman Mador" and two fiscales go through the whole pueblo obliging the children and everyone unmarried to come to church and attend the Mass with devotion and silence; afterwards all pray the doctrine with the missionary; at sunset the same is repeated at the church door and closes with the rosary, the Salve and the Alabado. On Sundays and feast days the mador and fiscales are ordered to oblige all the men, women and children to attend Mass "con sus pobres vestidos limpios, y todos lavados y peinados".
This college's method ran on Castilian, not on the mission language. The doctrine is prayed "en lengua Castellana"; in Lent all are obliged to daily Mass and to pray "las oraciones en lengua Castellana"; and the missionaries report that in the last compliances "se han confesado todos los Jóvenes y algunos viejos en lengua Castellana", adding that in the first years it had seemed to them impossible to overcome the difficulty of confessing the Indians at all. Two centuries after the great missionary grammars of Mexico, the working language of these pueblos was the coloniser's.
The music was local and it was indigenous. On Sundays and feast days, the report says, "se canta la Misa con arpas, violines y quatro ó seis Indios ó Indias cantoras", and on the most solemn feasts of the Virgin the rosary is sung in procession through the pueblo.
The same report indicts its own results, and the chronicle prints the sentence: "Los Indios en lo general están muy atrasados de doctrina y catequismo, y en los Pueblos de visita tan ignorantes y salvages, que solo el bautismo los distingue de los bárbaros Gentiles." That is the missionaries writing to the viceroy about the fruit of their own ministry.
The offices the friar actually held are listed in the same document. For want of any civil society among the Indians of these missions, the report says, the missionaries are obliged to act as fathers of a family, "recogiendo, alimentando y vistiendo á los huerfanos, impedidos y viejos"; as physician and nurse of the whole pueblo, "donde no hay ni se halla otra botica y recurso que la casa y despensa del Misionero"; and as tutors and advocates of the Indians' persons and property.
Who the friars say they were defending the Indians against is named, and the naming is the point: they act as tutors and advocates "defendiéndolos de las opresiones y engaños á que los obligan los que viven en sus Pueblos, ó de aquellos que tienen su mayor interes en que los Indios no salgan de su barbaridad, infelicidad, y desnudez." The oppressors in that sentence are the Spanish neighbours and the men who profit from keeping the Indians where they are, and the accusation is printed by the order, in Mexico, with licence.
The pueblo elected its own officers every year. The report on the temporal method opens: "Todos los años en presencia del Padre, y á consulta de todo el Pueblo se elige el Gobernador y los demas Justicias", who are given a distinguished place in the church so that they are respected, "y que llevan el gobierno de lo que pertenece á su fuero." An elective indigenous magistracy with a jurisdiction of its own sat inside the mission regime.
The economy described is mixed and the machinery is specific. There are communal milpas held "como en depósito" against scarcity, and the governors and alcaldes are charged with their cultivation and with naming shepherds weekly; at sowing time all the Indians come to the missionary, who calls the governor, and the seed each wants to sow is distributed to each in particular, the governor assigning the tools and yoked oxen each is to take "del comun del Pueblo" and seeing that they are given back. When the pueblo works in common the governor or alcalde orders food set out for those working.
Relief was rationed by the harvest and the document says so: the sick are assisted with food suited to their illness, and "á las viudas, viejos é imposibilitados se les socorre en quanto permite la abundancia ó escasez de los frutos y bienes de la Mision", while the missionary gathers and cares for all the orphans. The report also concedes that the individual sowings the missionaries had pressed for "les aprovecha muy poco por las causas y desórdenes insinuados en el informe de Abril" - the friars' own admission that the arrangement was failing the people it was for.
The method was under attack from Mexico while it ran. The chronicle reports that "densas nubes" were raised there against the missionaries, saying that while the present spiritual and temporal government of the missions continued, the missionaries' labours were idle and the expenditure from the Real Hacienda superfluous. The crown fiscal asked the viceroy for a new method that would put the missions "en Pueblos formados, y no en Rancherias, como hoy están las mas", introduce "el órden de familias", and plant agriculture, the civil arts and "aquel comercio pasible en que se enlazen y unan á solicitar lo que necesiten mutuamente."
Arricivita's answer to that programme is recorded here as his, not as a finding. Orders went to the guardians of all three colleges and to the provincial superiors, so that many and various methods came back; and because the informants' knowledge was in his phrase not acquired "con sus sudores y fatigas, sino mendigados y revestidos de particulares ideas y arbitrios", the results "no podian ser ni llamarse reglas del deseado gobierno, ni adaptarse á las circunstancias de los lugares". He then reports that the government the visitador had approved was left unaltered. This is the college defending its own practice against a reform, and it is weighed as such.
The college also gave missions up, and stated a principle for doing it. In 1772, the chronicle says, renunciations of its old charges multiplied: the guardian and discretorio ordered the procurator of the missions in Mexico to propose to the viceroy the renunciation of the seven missions the college administered in the Pimería Baja, "por ser Pueblos sin Gentiles, y ya aptos para entregarlos al Ordinario", and a chapter of its own records the renunciation of the six missions of the provinces of Coahuila and Texas. A doctrina with no more gentiles in it was to be handed to the bishop.
What this evidence cannot do should be said plainly. Everything above is the friars describing themselves - a chronicle by a former prefect of the college quoting reports the missionaries wrote for a viceroy who was deciding whether to keep paying them. No Indian of these pueblos speaks anywhere in it, the compliance the reports describe was enforced by the mador and the fiscales, and nothing here shows what the elected governor's jurisdiction amounted to in practice.