Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830–1949

Missions played a vital role in frontier development in Latin America throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were key to the penetration of national societies into the regions and indigenous lands that the nascent republics claimed as their jurisdictions. In Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree, Erick D. Langer examines one of the most important Catholic mission systems in republican-era Latin America, the Franciscan missions among the Chiriguano Indians in southeastern Bolivia. Using that mission system as a model for understanding the relationship between indigenous peoples and missionaries in the post-independence period, Langer explains how the missions changed over their lifespan and how power shifted between indigenous leaders and the missionaries in an ongoing process of negotiation. Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree is based on twenty years of research, including visits to the sites of nearly every mission discussed and interviews with descendants of mission Indians, Indian chiefs, Franciscan friars, mestizo settlers, and teachers. Langer chronicles how, beginning in the 1840s, the establishment of missions fundamentally changed the relationship between the Chiriguano villages and national society. He looks at the Franciscan missionaries' motives, their visions of ideal missions, and the realities they faced. He also examines mission life from the Chiriguano point of view, considering their reasons for joining missions and their resistance to conversion, as well as the interrelated issues of Indian acculturation and the development of the mission economy, particularly in light of the relatively high rates of Indian mortality and outmigration. Expanding his focus, Langer delves into the complex interplay of Indians, missionaries, frontier society, and the national government until the last remaining missions were secularized in 1949. He concludes with a comparative analysis between colonial and republican-era missions throughout Latin America.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations and Tables ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. The "Chiriguano Wars": Indian Warfare and the Establishment of the Missions 21 2. The Franciscans 61 3. Death and Migration: The Population Decline of the Missions 101 4. Daily Life and the Development of Mission Culture 126 5. Conversion, Chiefs, and Rebellions: Relationships of Power on the Missions 160 6. Missions and the Frontier Economy 196 7. Outside Relations and the Decline of the Missions 218 8. From the Chaco War to Secularization, 1932–1949 257 9. Comparions 270 Appendix: The Inauguration of Tiguipa Church (1902) 284 Glossary 289 Notes 291 Bibliography 337 Index 355

About the Author :
Erick D. Langer is Professor of History and core faculty at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia, 1880-1930; editor of Contemporary Indigenous Movements in Latin America; and co-editor of The New Latin American Mission History.

Review :
"Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree is a superb book. Erick D. Langer departs from previous historical work with his portrayals of the mission life cycle (which no future historian writing on the topic will be able to ignore); missions in the republican period; the Bolivian Chaco; the frontier as a permeable, advancing and contracting concept, rather than a bright line; and the ethno-history of the Chirguano, from autonomy to dependence." David Block, author of Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660-1880 "Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree brings the republican-era Franciscan missions of the Chiriguano of southeastern Bolivia into the center of frontier history. Erick D. Langer integrates the empirical data from numerous archives into cultural frameworks in ways that create a powerful narrative of ethnogenesis in the 'fields of interaction' that emerged from the institutional mission."--Cynthia Radding, author of Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850