The case for the armed frontier (1742): Mota Padilla's chapter arguing that force pacifies where preaching alone does not
A criollo lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara gave a chapter of his history to arguing that the mission-only frontier policy of California, Texas, Sonora and Nayarit had failed and that arms, presidios and settler families should replace it. He argues it with dates, costs and a casualty comparison, and concedes in passing that converts were told they were free to accept the faith but not to leave it. The argument is printed here because hiding it proves nothing.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the Spanish frontier either quote the humanitarian tradition — Montesinos, Las Casas, Vitoria, the 1573 ban on the word conquista — or assert that it was a dead letter, and almost never put a named eighteenth-century Spaniard's argument for force on the page in his own words. This object does that from a chapter that states its thesis in its own heading: the two-century results comparison, the casualty argument, the 300,000 pesos a year in presidios kept up solely to protect missionaries, the thirteen missions and sixty soldiers of California, one friar to ten families where one once served twenty pueblos, and the geopolitical fear of an English landing. It also prints the two sentences a partisan of either side would cut: that converts were given free will to accept the faith and told that once accepted "no les era lícito retroceder", and that the people of the Nayarit fled because they had already heard the doctrine and detested it. Reading the strongest version of the argument next to the legislation and the counter-tradition that defeated it is what makes the rest of this corpus credible rather than defensive.
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 chapter announces its thesis in its own heading, and the heading is the reason this entry exists. Chapter LXXXVIII of the manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742 is headed: "La pacificacion de los indios con mano fuerte, como se hizo en los principios, es mas eficaz que por solo la predicacion, con las razones que lo persuaden." The chapter is an argument, not a narration, and it stands immediately before the author's account of the armed reduction of the Nayarit. This object registers it as evidence of what was argued in New Spain in 1742 and by whom; it does not present the argument as sound, and the objections to it are stated below and are carried at length by other objects in this corpus.
The empirical core of the argument is a comparison of two policies by their results over two centuries. "En diez años se pacificó la Nueva-España, Guatemala, la mayor parte del Perú y la Nueva-Galicia, penetrando sus provincias en mano fuerte, y en casi dos siglos no se ha podido penetrar por la predicacion lo restante, siendo así que su Magestad ha fomentado presidios." He adds a casualty comparison in the same paragraph: "es sin comparacion mayor el número de los que han muerto indefensos á manos de indios apóstatas, que el número de españoles que entraron á la pacificacion de los reinos que están reducidos: muchísimos mas religiosos ministros han muerto á manos de sus feligreses, que los que bastaron á la reduccion de innumerables gentiles." Both figures are assertions; neither is supported in the chapter by a source, a list or a number, and the deaths of indigenous people in the ten years he praises do not enter the comparison at all.
The concession that most damages his own case is made in his own voice, and it is about freedom of conscience. Describing how the missions were made possible in the pacified provinces, he writes that the conqueror "entró á fuerza de armas, ganóles los caminos, sujetóles á su ceguedad, dejándoles su albedrío para abrazar la fé católica; pero al mismo tiempo se les dió á entender que una vez abrazada no les era lícito retroceder". Free will to accept and no liberty to leave, stated as the working arrangement rather than as an accusation. That is the exact practice the sixteenth-century theologians of Salamanca had denied could bind, and it is printed here by a defender of the policy, which makes it a stronger piece of evidence about what the frontier actually was than any hostile summary.
His central analogy is drawn from Spain, and it is the least racial argument in the chapter. Remove from Spain, he proposes, "los arzobispos, obispos, provisores, jueces eclesiásticos y seculares; deróguense las leyes políticas, las sanciones canónicas, los establecimientos, pragmáticas y ordenanzas, y queden solo los predicadores evangélicos… no dudo que en algunos se conservara, pero muchos mas se pervirtieran" — and he goes on to ask how many, even among the religious, would remain apostate if they did not fear temporal penalties. The claim is that no population holds a religion without coercive institutions and that Spaniards would be no different. He then spoils the parity: "con mayor razon debemos temerlo en los indios, cuyas costumbres, tan de atras, están viciadas por sus torpezas é idolatrías, embriagueces y abusos." The argument that begins by levelling ends by ranking, in the space of two sentences.
The paternalism is explicit rather than implied, and it is worth quoting because it is usually attributed to the empire's critics rather than found in its defenders. "Así como seria ridículo dejar á la voluntad de los niños su aprovechamiento, el ir ó no á la escuela, dejarles el gobierno sobre sus padres y maestros; así y mucho mas seria, dejarles á los indios dicha libertad y gobierno, pues son mas incapaces." His stated reason for the comparison is pedagogical rather than biological — that it is easier to teach a doctrine to someone who has none than to teach a new one and unteach an old one at the same time — but the word he uses is "incapaces", and this entry does not soften it.
The chapter is also an unusually frank fiscal and administrative description of what the mission frontier cost and how thin it was. The king, he writes, "está teniendo… varios presidios de soldados, en que gasta 300,000 pesos en cada un año, con el fin solo de defender á los religiosos misioneros"; California has thirteen missions and sixty soldiers at the king's charge and that of some benefactors. He reports one missionary now administering "solo á diez familias que hay en una ranchería" where formerly one served "quince ó veinte pueblos esparcidos en distancias de treinta y cuarenta leguas"; and he characterises the unreduced provinces as places where the Indians "no pagan tributo, no reconocen mas superior que á su padre ministro". The 300,000 pesos is his figure and is unsupported in the chapter; the rest is the testimony of a well-placed official about a frontier that was neither taxed nor governed.
Nayarit is his worked example, and he is careful to record that the missionaries went in first and freely. "Así lo vemos en el Nayarit, en donde en los principios hacian con libertad, aunque con trabajo, sus entradas los religiosos, tendian sus redes y sacaban algunas familias de gentiles; pero al mismo paso que de estos algunos se volvian apostatando, se fué dificultando mas la conversion, porque avergonzados, formaban su resistencia en la fuga, no queriendo oir doctrina que ya habian oido y detestado; y fué necesario entrarles en el modo ordinario… con que fué por armas." He extends the same prescription by name to California, Sonora, Coahuila, New Mexico, Texas, the Nuevo Reino de León and Florida. What his own sentence concedes, without his noticing it, is that the people of the Nayarit had heard the doctrine and rejected it, and that their resistance took the form of flight — which is a description of a decision, not of incapacity.
He anticipates the strongest objection to settlement — that Spanish settlers were the problem — states it fairly and answers it weakly. "Error es querer persuadir que las malas costumbres de algunos cristianos viejos sean el óbice para que se admitan familias en tierras de gentiles, porque aunque algunos procedan tan mal, que sean en sus costumbres peores que bárbaros, sin embargo, firmemente confiesan la fé… no todos los cristianos viejos han de ser tan perversos… en una familia hay hombres y mujeres, bueno y malo; pues no se reprueba el todo por la parte." The objection he is answering was the standing position of the mission orders, whose whole method rested on keeping settlers, soldiers and stock out of the mission pueblos; his answer concedes that some settlers were "peores que bárbaros" and rests everything on their professing the faith. The point of recording this is that the argument was being had, in print, by the people conducting it.
The chapter closes with a colonisation programme, and its manpower proposals include penal transportation. He wants shipping multiplied and the ports of California and Sonora frequented; "fúndense iglesias, erijanse obispados, entren religiosos, cultívese la tierra, coméreiense recíprocamente sus frutos, ocúpese tanta gente ociosa que vemos en las cortes y ciudades, fórmense repúblicas, fortifíquense los puertos, en cuyas obras unos avanzarán premios por lo que obraren, otros los castigos que merecieren, otros desterrados en la isla enmendarán el mal ejemplo que dieren". The driving urgency is geopolitical rather than religious: "si los ingleses arriban, del todo se acabó la cristiandad en aquellos países, y se cerró la puerta á la California." He also notes that the crown had already ordered forty families sent to California, and that a providencia of 18 September 1703 had directed a presidio be built where the China ship made land, with voluntary families to settle it — a policy, he says, that was not carried out.
The counterpoint is that this position lost the argument inside the Spanish tradition, and the losing side is the one this corpus documents elsewhere. Montesinos in 1511 and Vitoria's relection on the Indies deny that unbelief is a title to make war; the Valladolid debate was held on precisely the question this chapter reopens; the Ordenanzas of 1573 struck the word conquista out of official language and prescribed pacification by treaty and settlement; the guerra defensiva of Chile and the parlamentos that followed it are a century of frontier policy built on the opposite premise; and the Jesuit and Franciscan mission methods this chapter attacks were themselves defended in writing by their practitioners. Mota Padilla is a provincial lawyer stating a hard-line view in an unpublished manuscript, not a legislator; the legislation of his own century ran the other way. What his chapter proves is that the argument was live, that it was made by respectable men, and that Spanish frontier practice was contested from inside rather than settled.
The limits of this entry. All of it is read from pages 461 to 465 of the 1870 Mexico printing of a manuscript finished in 1742 by a criollo lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, in a chapter that is openly polemical and that prefaces his own narrative of an armed reduction. No mission report, presidio muster, treasury account or royal order was seen for this entry; the 300,000 pesos, the thirteen missions and sixty soldiers, the casualty comparison and the ten-year pacification are all his assertions. No indigenous account appears anywhere in the chapter: the people of the Nayarit, California, Sonora and Texas are described entirely from outside, and their reasons for flight are supplied by the man arguing for their subjection. Nothing here establishes whether the argument influenced any decision, and it should not be cited as evidence of crown policy, which by 1742 was formally the opposite.