The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule

stable family structures based on strong Catholic marriages. With all this in place, the people needed to live together in orderly towns. They could then promote the infrastructural improvements—such as roads and irrigation ditches—that they needed to develop for agricultural and commercial growth. Mining was also an important economic factor, but the Bishop was concerned about indigenous laborers being harshly exploited—both underground in silver pits and aboveground on haciendas and in obrajes. In addition to wanting to improve the social and economic well-being of his diocesans, Martínez Compañón’s questionnaire demonstrates that he also sought to learn about “the arts, society, and culture of the Indians of Peru.”⁴² He inquired about their knowledge of materia medica, or botanical medicines, balsams, and any antidotes they might use against the bites of poisonous animals. He wanted to know about their antiquities and whether they had abandoned their idolatrous practices. Once it was received and compiled, this information would help him to construct his living utopia in Trujillo. He could also employ it as evidence in his ongoing campaign to demonstrate the Indians’ intellectual capacity.

      Had the responses to these questionnaires survived in municipal or state archives, they would have formed an unbelievably fecund source for scholarship on local life in northern Peru in the late colonial period. Unfortunately, years of research in Peru, Colombia, and Spain produced almost no evidence of responses. But this does not mean that they were never written; Viceroy Croix’s report on his term in office clearly describes how Martínez Compañón gave him “an exact and prolific document with reports of priests, subdelegates, and Indian officials … everything with the corresponding documentation.” Convinced that the reform agenda that they meant to support was “of utmost importance,” Croix shared the reports with the Ministerio Fiscal in Lima. By June 1786, the viceroy had seen that the files were sent to Fernando Saavedra, the intendant of Trujillo. From there, they disappeared from the archival record.⁴³

      The Visita

      After such an effort preparing the questionnaire, organizing his team, and packing for what was sure to be a lengthy expedition, Martínez Compañón finally set out on the cool, clear Southern Hemisphere winter morning of June 21, 1782. That day, he began designing and implementing his utopian agenda for Trujillo. The visita would allow him a bird’s-eye view of his territory. He would meet local authority figures and personally assess the challenges faced by provinces and municipalities. He would learn about the region’s natural resources and come to understand its best chances for improvement. Perhaps most important, he could spread news of his utopian vision, gathering support for his plans and inspiring local communities to begin the challenging but rewarding process of reforming their own futures. First he traveled north from Trujillo along the Camino Real through the pale sands and crescent-shaped dunes of the Sechura Desert and into the sunny, verdant Chicama Valley. After a brief stop at the seaside town of Chicama, he headed up into the Cajamarca sierra, where he visited several small towns, including Contumazá, Trinidad, and Gusmango, which he reached on June 25. He continued northeast through the sierra to Celendín, a sparsely populated area where Indians lived scattered on distant haciendas. Here he conducted a thorough inspection of the local clergy, cautioning priests to carefully record names, dates, and the socioeconomic status of townspeople who presented themselves for baptism, marriage, and other sacraments.⁴⁴ He commissioned a map of the pre-Hispanic Moche irrigation canals that bifurcated the local landscape.⁴⁵ Here he also made his first attempt at founding a new town—something that the local hacienda workers requested he assist them with. As the next chapter shows, his efforts to establish Amalia de Celendín were successful—a 1794 letter from the local priest revealed that there were already two hundred houses built there, and in 1802, the Crown officially bestowed upon Celendín the title of villa, meaning that it was now an official Spanish settlement, with a population of two thousand to four thousand inhabitants.⁴⁶

      From Celendín, the Bishop and his sorrel mare, along with Echevarri and the rest of the party, headed down the sierra toward the Marañón Valley and the Amazonian province of Moyobamba. Although it was the largest of the ecclesiastical provinces of Trujillo, it had only one significant town—also named Moyobamba. The Trujillo watercolors include a map that shows the province to be “in the mountains,” sparsely settled except for along the Moyobamba, Negro, and Tonchima Rivers. It stood surrounded by jungle forests and was an arduous eight-day mule journey from the nearest population center. This Amazonian lowland terrain was the most difficult to travel of the bishopric, with frighteningly precipitous roads and rivers that swelled past their banks during the rainy season, making the entire region impassable. The thick jungle vegetation teemed with dangerous animals, many of which are depicted in the Trujillo del Perú volumes, such as the ferocious mountain lion, red and black tapa machacuai rattlesnakes, and deadly scorpions. Here in the middle of the wilderness, the Bishop founded another new town, Santo Toribio de la Nueva Rioja, named after the great defender of the Indians he eventually had recognized as the patron saint of Trujillo.⁴⁷

      By September, after almost three months on the road, the team headed back west toward Chachapoyas province. Strategically located between jungle and sierra, its main city (also Chachapoyas) was the vital commercial and transport link between these two regions. The Bishop planned to found a primary school there. In their free moments, he and his team spent several afternoons observing the embroidery and sewing work of local women, famed throughout the bishopric. Next, the party headed along the coast to Paita, and then to the city of Piura. They stayed there for several months, using it as a home base from which to make shorter trips, including one to San Miguel de Piura, one of the towns in which Martínez Compañón hoped (but was ultimately unable) to found a seminary of ecclesiastical workers. The people of Piura also requested their prelate’s help to found new towns, so that they could live more independently on lands owned by hacendados, enjoying regular access to priests, schools, and communal support. The story of what happened with two proposed towns in their province is retold in Chapter 3.

      From there, the party traveled back down through the sierra, reaching the town of Sechura by late May of 1783. Here the Bishop ordered a new retablo, or decorative altar, built for the parish church. Quick stops in Monsefú and Reque were followed by a visit to the town of Saña, the burial place of Archbishop Santo Toribio. It might have been here that Martínez Compañón acquired what would be his parting gift to the Trujillo cathedral seven years later: a holy relic of Toribio that he placed in a gold reliquary encrusted with nineteen pearls and forty-four diamonds.⁴⁸ The party’s next stop was Lambayeque, the most important town in the region. The city map that they produced was extensive, illustrating the cathedral, four churches, and hospital within its city limits, as well as the extensive canal that rounded the city, separating it from the outlying agricultural fields. Here the Bishop tried to found another seminario de operarios and build an underground crypt like the one he had completed in Trujillo’s cathedral.⁴⁹ In his free moments, he instructed his assistants to gather samples of local cascarilla (also known as quina, the bark that was the basis of malaria-combating quinine), and bought or acquired a locally manufactured black hat made of vicuña wool, which he later added to the crates of his collection of the manufactured goods of Trujillo.⁵⁰

      Finally, the visita brought the team back into the Andes, south of Lambayeque. On October 23, 1783, they arrived at the Hualgayoc silver mines, situated outside Cajamarca at over 13,000 feet above sea level. They went there with a purpose: the local miners’ guild had requested the Bishop’s help to improve their economic situation. After meeting with them, he developed a proposal to found a new town called Los Dos Carlos, which would provide volunteer workers with free land and the implements to work it. As Chapter 5 will demonstrate, this became an idealistic microcosm of his broader vision of improvement for his bishopric.

      After quick stops at the doctrinas of San Pablo and Contumazá, the Bishop headed to the villa of Cajamarca, the site of the fateful first meeting between Pizarro and the Inca Atahualpa in 1532. Cajamarca was the second most important city in the bishopric, home to the miners and merchants who had made their fortunes at the Hualgayoc Mountain. One of these was Miguel Espinach, who owned mines and a hacienda and served as a