The Bishop and the Debate about the Indians in Eighteenth-Century Trujillo, Peru

This paper examines Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, who during his tenure in Trujillo, Peru, from 1779-1791, envisioned a reform agenda that would serve as a real-time contribution to the contemporary debate over the supposed inferiority of America’s native peoples and natural world. Instead of penning his defense of his adopted American home from a distance back in Spain (as did the exiled Jesuits who are most typically associated with this debate), Martínez Compañón imagined a vision of utopian reform for Trujillo that incorporated local Indians into engineering their own improvement. Working with local populations, he planned and built orderly town settlements, local primary schools, and even imagined how to remake local mining camps into visions of civility, sociability, and economic liberalism. At the same time, he engaged Trujillo’s Indians as informants and illustrators in a massive inventory of local natural history (plants, animals, antiquities), thus showcasing both the utility and abundance of local nature and the advanced intellectual and artistic capabilities of Indians. In his actions and his written rhetoric, Martínez Compañón sought above all else to prove, as he put it, that “the Indians are rational men, with souls just like ours.”