Date of Graduation

5-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in History (MA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

History

Advisor/Mentor

Shawn M. Austin

Committee Member

Spencer L. Allen

Second Committee Member

Nikolay A. Antov

Keywords

Colonial Latin America; Guairá; Guaraní; History; Jesuits; Sexuality

Abstract

The Jesuits in seventeenth century Guairá attempted to shift the sin of adultery and polygyny away from Guaraní men, and onto Guaraní women in their process of evangelization in Paraguay. The Jesuits did so because Guaraní men, as influential patriarchs within the missions, would revolt against the Jesuits or flee the Jesuit missions in response to Jesuit indoctrination that denounced the practice of polygyny. This is evident through two works of the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya: one lexical, the Tesoro, and the other narrative, the Conquista. Montoya was directly involved in the founding and maintenance of the Guaraní missions, and in the Conquista, he clearly identifies polygyny as a practice of Guaraní men. However, in the Tesoro, Montoya places the blame for illicit sexual behavior on Guaraní women. This dichotomy reveals that while Jesuits identified polygyny as facilitated by Guaraní men evident in the narrative of the missions, the Tesoro reflects Jesuit interests in focusing their attention to the sexual behavior of Guaraní women. This is because Guaraní women lacked the social and political status of Guaraní men, so Jesuits saw they could promote Guaraní women to do the work of getting Guaraní men to abandon polygyny for them. The Tesoro was both a product and producer of colonial discourse and was meant to purify linguistic Guaraní of un-Christian values. There are 14 emic phrases in the Tesoro related to sexuality, and 13 of them are given in the female voice. Of these, Guaraní men are given to be the primary agent behind sex in only 2 of these phrases, while the Guaraní woman is the primary agent in four. In the Conquista, there are dozens of sexual encounters between Guaraní men and women, and only in 2 are Guaraní women depicted as the primary agents in initiating these encounters. This stark contrast between which gender initiates the sexual encounter between the two works reveals that the Jesuits acknowledged Guaraní men as the perpetrators of illicit sexual behavior, seen in the Conquista, but in the Tesoro, the Guaraní women shoulder the blame for sexual behavior. The Conquista is permeated with passages where Guaraní men revolt against the Jesuits in response to preaching against polygyny, and that Montoya explicitly states he stayed quiet on enforcing the Augustinian 6th Commandment, which forbade polygyny, to avoid these revolts. In the Conquista, men are overwhelmingly the primary agents for sexual encounters with Guaraní women. These caricatures of Guaraní men in Montoya’s Conquista contrast with the emic phrases pertaining to sexuality in the bilingual dictionary named the Tesoro, where all but 1 emic phrases related to sexuality is ascribed the female voice. It was in the Tesoro where Montoya directly inserted Jesuit prerogatives of rejecting polygyny through the form of emic and example phrases. The Conquista is a narrative of evangelization, while the Tesoro was a tool for evangelization. The differences in portraying sexual behaviors depicted in the two sources reveal Jesuit prerogatives in assigning blame for illicit sex to Guaraní women.

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