CHAPTER 2
Parish Priests and Useful Information
On May 13, 1779, the new Bishop of Trujillo made his first official entrance into what was now his cathedral city. The journey from Lima would have taken him on the King’s Road, or Camino Real, the thoroughfare that hugged Peru’s Pacific Coast. Coming from the south, he would have entered the city from the New Huaman gate and preceded up what is today Francisco Pizarro Street, named for the conquistador who founded it in 1535. To honor this occasion, he might have chosen some of his most luxurious clothing—perhaps one of his fine Dutch silk shirts and gold lamé vestments bordered with gold thread, with the ensemble finished with British stockings and a bracelet with a large emerald surrounded by pink diamonds.1 To the left side of the road lay Trujillo’s Jesuit College, empty of the Saint Ignatius order since its 1767 expulsion from the Spanish territories. Several blocks north, the modest seventeenth-century Santo Domingo Convent and Church came into view. Once the carriage crossed the street that is today named for Pizarro’s friend-turned-foe Diego de Almagro, Martínez Compañón’s gaze would have landed on Trujillo’s pristine, perfectly square plaza mayor. It was significantly smaller than that of Lima but nonetheless home to the necessary buildings of state and church administration, including the municipal cabildo, the jail, the cathedral, and the Bishop’s palace, which would be his official home for the next eleven years. The brightly painted casona mansions of Trujillo’s well-to-do merchants and agronomists overtook the remaining lots around the plaza. Behind the wooden screens shading their traditional Moorish balconies, appropriately demure young ladies could observe the goings-on of the city without exposing themselves to public view. The houses’ high walls concealed rear private gardens resplendent with vibrant fuchsia bougainvillea and purple morning glories.
Even in the midst of such beauty, many of central Trujillo’s buildings were crumbling or stood empty. Much of the city had yet to rebuild from the earthquakes that struck the north coast in 1729 and 1759. One such unlucky structure was the city’s cathedral, which had been badly damaged in the last tremor. Furthermore, the same gentle ocean breezes that wafted through the city carried with them sand from the Pacific beaches three miles away—so much sand that sometimes pedestrians waded through knee-deep drifts to cross city streets. Outside the city walls, the poor mestizos, mulattos, and other mixed-race castas occupied the former Indian ghettos called rancherías, which, by the 1780s, had become slumlike.2
Of his visit to Trujillo over twenty years later, Alexander Humboldt dismissively wrote that “it is necessary to be familiar with Peruvian cities to find any beauty in a city like Trujillo.”3 Yet sandy streets and unattractive buildings were the least of Martínez Compañón’s concerns. Even before he left Spain for America, he had dreamed of learning about and helping the Indians; when he arrived in Trujillo, he found himself responsible for 118,324 of them. In a 1783 circular letter to “My Beloved Children, the Indians of this Bishopric of Trujillo,” he promised that “since I have arrived in these kingdoms … I have not forgone any occasion … to be useful to you, and to help you to know with my words, and my deeds, all that I have been able to do for your true well-being.”4 Happily, some of the Indians living in Trujillo city already seemed to be the hardworking plebeians whom the Bishop and other reformers of the eighteenth century tried to cultivate; they spoke fluent Castilian, wore Spanish-style clothes, and worked as artisans or manual laborers. But in provincial areas of the bishopric, many lived in poor, rural communities. They made meager wages as porters, farmers, or fishermen, often living in simple reed choza huts. Others resided on the outskirts of local haciendas, where they ceaselessly worked small plots of land in vain attempts to repay their debts to wealthy landlords. The situation was even direr in the Amazonian jungle regions, where some natives existed entirely outside the Spanish sphere of influence, such as the “infidel” Indians of Hibitos and Cholones, in the extreme eastern territory of the bishopric (see Plates 10 and 18). These “infidels” might have been the very men and women who kept Martínez Compañón awake on certain nights; their total isolation from European society and Catholic morals was a harsh reminder of the collective inability of the Crown and the Church to penetrate the deepest reaches of northern Peru.
Trujillo’s Indians would soon become the almost singular focus of Martínez Compañón’s utopian reform agenda, but in actuality his bishopric was much more diverse. His own demographic calculations listed the ecclesiastical province of Trujillo as the home of 118,324 Indians; 79,043 mestizos; 21,980 Spanish (including Creoles born in America); 16,630 pardos (mixed-race of African descent); and 4,486 blacks. The pardos and blacks were the smallest groups; but when combined, their total population rivaled that of the Spanish and made the city home to the viceroyalty’s second-largest black population. Though many were slaves who had been brought to the coastal regions through Panama to work on area sugar plantations, the majority were free, lived in urban areas, and worked in skilled trades such as masonry and carpentry. Some, such as Master Architect Tomás Rodríguez, even collaborated with the Bishop on important projects, including rebuilding the towers of Trujillo’s cathedral and rehabilitating the damaged church at Ferreñafe, northeast of Chiclayo. Paradoxically, although people of African descent constituted such a significant part of Trujillo’s population, Martínez Compañón never imagined how they might be incorporated into his utopian vision. In this, he was similar to other reformers of the Spanish eighteenth century, who focused on generating a productive plebeian class of poor Spaniards, mestizos, and Indians while relegating people of African descent to the category of slaves, marking them as easily replaceable beings unworthy of improvement.5
In terms of market forces, the fate of slavery was tied to the broader fiscal well-being of Trujillo. Bourbon economic restructuring meant that while Trujillo’s hacendados had been previously able to purchase African slaves from Panama, they could now do so only by way of Buenos Aires and secondary markets in Chile and Lima. As a result, slaves were suddenly more expensive and scarcer, driving up labor costs. At the same time, cheaper Brazilian sugar was flooding the Peruvian market. By 1784, the situation was so bad that Crown-appointed visitador Jorge Escobedo, who spent six years in Peru acting on behalf of the powerful minister of the Indies José de Gálvez, met with local officials to discuss the matter. In response to their complaints, he proposed that Brazilian sugar be prohibited in Spanish territory and that slaves be made available for purchase in Panama. His suggestion fell on characteristically deaf royal ears.6
Slaves aside, the situation in Trujillo was so dismal that in 1763, Corregidor Don Miguel Feyjoo concluded that “it seems that the same appreciable advantages for human happiness have turned into ruin and desolation. Not only … the many Spanish who have come to Peru, but also … the … natural children of the country [the Indians] find themselves notably diminished.”7 There seemed to be an almost endless need for improvement in Trujillo. Martínez Compañón would dedicate himself to it with an intensity reflected—but not equaled—by his colleagues among the bishops and archbishops of America, marking himself as an iconoclast among reforming prelates. To accomplish such a far-reaching agenda for change, he relied on the clergy to become foot soldiers working to foster public happiness and improvement at the farthest corners of the bishopric. He tasked them with promoting the agricultural, economic, and educational development that was the foundation of his utopian vision. At the same time, they would act as collaborators in his natural history research, sharing invaluable data on local resources, traditions, and customs. Although Martínez Compañón employed the time-tested information-gathering techniques of questionnaires and a visita to learn about his bishopric, he still needed local clergy to function as his eyes on the ground. It was only with their dedicated assistance that Trujillo could move forward toward its idealized future.
A Bourbon Bishop in Trujillo
When Martínez Compañón was named bishop of Trujillo, he became a member of the so-called Bourbon prelates: high-level ecclesiastics of the eighteenth century who functioned as “a kind of religious