agenda that the Bishop imagined for Trujillo.
In 1773, Martínez Compañón became a member of the Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País, or the Basque Friends of the Country Society, a social organization dedicated to improvement and reform that would likewise prove influential in his future imaginings of utopia in Trujillo. Founded in the Basque town of Vergara in 1765, this was the first of scores of economic societies established throughout Spain and America in the late eighteenth century. Although an ocean and a continent separated him from Vergara, Martínez Compañón’s membership in the Basque society was not an anomaly: the majority of the society’s nobles, government officials, academics, and clergy were men of Basque origin pursuing careers in other parts of the empire. Their original manifesto outlined their goal as “the socialization of progress [and] collective improvement … [of the] labor of groups and institutions.” Their many publications provided suggestions for improvement that Martínez Compañón later planned to implement in Trujillo: cultivating alfalfa and flax, promoting agriculture and industry, building town primary schools, and educating women. They suggested that students’ improvement be rewarded with prizes, and they thought contests useful for promoting technological advancement. In its 1780 ordinances, the Basque Society promoted the study of the arts, particularly drawing, which it decreed “useful to all types of people,” since it was “the basis of the liberal arts, the soul of many branches of commerce” and “a universal language that can benefit everyone.”47
Martínez Compañón carried these ideas with him when, on February 25, 1778, he was promoted to become the next bishop of Trujillo, in the north of Peru, near Ecuador. Reforming the Indians, promoting primary education, and pairing religious and social goals would become the foundations of his utopian agenda there. When complete, his successes would make plain to the rest of Peru, the Spanish Empire, and the world beyond that the Indians were fully capable members of society. Yet even with such a vast array of improvement strategies at his disposal, there were inevitable reservations. Being assigned to a post that was comparatively poor and isolated may have been somewhat of a disappointment. He subtly revealed these feelings in a letter from 1790 in which he wrote about how much he had loved Trujillo, “even though it was not Lima.”48 Regardless of any doubts he might have had, in 1778 he was scheduled to be confirmed as bishop the following June. When the necessary decrees finally arrived, he learned that, like all bishops in America, he was responsible for obeying the laws of the Indies and ensuring that all ecclesiastical income was to be shared with the Crown. From Lima that March, he confirmed: “I swear I will guard and comply with our king with all corresponding faith, observing all the laws of the patronato real [royal patronage of the Church], and that I will not contradict anything contained in them in any way.”49 After filing the paperwork and journeying 500 miles up the coast to Trujillo, he was confirmed as bishop on May 13, 1779.50 He was forty-two years old.
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
