building primary schools in his territory, as we will explore in greater detail in Chapter 4. In the Bishop’s utopia, priests were essential collaborators who would use their daily interactions with the local population to gather the data that he needed to construct his vision of reform for Trujillo.19
While promoting agricultural improvement and primary education might have been some of their most enjoyable responsibilities, priests in Trujillo also oversaw policía, or general orderliness in their parishes—a task that occasionally proved quite trying. In 1786, Francisco Simeón de Polo reported on a striking episode of unruliness from Saña, north of Trujillo. It began one night when two mestizos and a mulatto (who happened to be mute) were rehearsing for a play celebrating the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe and decided to partake in some unsanctioned merrymaking. Breaking into the local church, they pulled the statue of Mary from its display and headed for the room where the Augustinian brothers stored their religious garb. One mestizo donned a white ecclesiastical garment and a choir member’s cape, while the other found a frock with an image of San Francisco. Their mute mulatto companion dressed in the traditional black, long-sleeved habit of the Augustinian monks. The three proceeded to “make a scene … yelling as if they were preaching” to lampoon the strict Augustinian brothers (the documents do not suggest how a mute could have joined in this parody). The townspeople who had gathered nearby to enjoy a bonfire joined in their mockery until the wee hours of the morning, leaving the priest to report that, had he been there, “he would have instituted a remedy to avoid such excess and irreverence.” Later, he got his wish, as only one month after the incident was first drawn to Martínez Compañón’s attention, the Bishop decreed Polo to be a priest of “discernment, virtue, and discretion” who could conduct an investigation into the matter on his own. Leaving the matter to the priest’s discretion demonstrates how much the Bishop relied on his priests to maintain order and decorum at the local level. It was impossible for Martínez Compañón to personally ensure that his orders were followed, so he had to trust his priests to enforce proper decorum in the church and its environs. But this responsibility was only one aspect of a much bigger, and more innovative, role that he had planned for them in helping to build a utopia in Trujillo.20
Priests as Informants
Once the Bishop’s duties in the provincial capital were well under way, he turned to tasks elsewhere in his bishopric. To start, Martínez Compañón knew that he needed a thorough understanding of the 93,205 square miles of extreme geographic diversity that made up Trujillo, and he planned to obtain it by personally visiting as much of it as possible. His task of assessing such a large area was not simple—in fact, no prelate had traveled extensively in northern Peru since Archbishop Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo of Lima in the late 1500s. But eighteenth-century reform culture promoted the pastoral visita as the most efficient and thorough method of gathering data to promote reform at the provincial level. Charles III was so convinced of the visita’s utility that in 1776, he mandated that all American prelates make thorough visitations of their territories and remit the data to the Council of the Indies.21 Martínez Compañón readily accepted this duty. He hoped that his visita would help him gather the information he needed “to complete [a project] that His Majesty might review with his own eyes, or [to] be informed of … the different qualities of the lands, of the provinces of this bishopric, and its principal fruits and manufactures of its inhabitants.” Above all, he planned to gather information about the population of Trujillo, “so that this report might contribute to the prosperity of the towns of this bishopric and of the whole nation in general.”22 The parish priests would be key to this endeavor, as they had direct access to parishioners, who could assess the informants’ testimony and who would gather the material and visual reports that the Bishop requested. Once compiled, their data would serve as a foundation from which the Bishop and the people would begin to build their utopia.
Martínez Compañón’s words about prosperity are a reminder that even though he was first and foremost a man of the cloth, as a vassal of the king, a functionary of the state, and a citizen of the world, he was bound to improve the material and social situation of his diocesans. Accordingly, much of his work consisted of promoting one of the most important concepts of late eighteenth-century government: public happiness. The basis of this, according to Italian Catholic intellectual Ludovico Muratori (whose work Martínez Compañón owned) was charity—a principle made real only when it was executed in daily life.23 The Bishop had likely begun imagining this charitable work while still in Spain, where he would have started reading about ecclesiastics who worked with the Indians of America. In fact, Spain is where Martínez Compañón acquired his copies of the collected works of Juan de Palafox, bishop of Puebla, New Spain (1640–1655). Palafox wrote that in order to truly grasp how the Indians’ “nakedness, poverty, and work” enriched the state and the church, viceroys and bishops had to gather information from the parish priests who had daily contact with them. Like Martínez Compañón a century and a half later, Palafox was certain that once the Indians were properly understood and managed, they could become useful subjects. “They have a great facility to learn trades,” he argued, “because in seeing painting, they very soon paint; in seeing work, they work; and with incredible quickness, they learn four or six trades.”24
But before Martínez Compañón could seek the vital demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic data that would be the foundations of these improvements, he had to prepare for the long and difficult journey. In autumn 1782, his servants carefully folded his simple priest’s gown and singlet with an amice (a square piece of linen with a cross in the middle). They might have also prepared his gold-tipped cane, useful to maintain steady footing on precipitous rural roads. Outside the Bishop’s palace, stable hands might have been busy readying his sorrel horse and a small pack mule to carry other personal items.25 As his assistants and servants bustled about, Martínez Compañón selected the team that would accompany him: his secretary Pedro de Echevarri, a missionary, a chaplain, a notary, a scribe, a Spaniard named Antonio de Narbona (who, strangely, does not reappear in the documentation), his nephew José Ignacio Lecuanda, and six slaves to service the group.26 Perhaps one of these was Theodoro, a kitchen slave whom Martínez Compañón had purchased with the plan of granting him liberty in a few years (but as of the Bishop’s promotion to Bogotá, the unfortunate Theodoro was “inventoried” as property of the Trujillo episcopate).27
Meanwhile, Martínez Compañón coordinated how local clergy would receive the group. In April, he had sent a pastoral letter that told parish priests to expect the visita party. But rather than demanding the lavish ceremony and ritual that would typically accompany a bishop’s visit, he requested restraint and sobriety in their preparations. He cautioned that they were not to arrange for more than three dishes to be served at the midday meal, two at dinner, and one for dessert. In areas with no houses for his party’s lodging, priests were forbidden to order the construction of any structures for their use. “I have decided,” the Bishop wrote, “to bring a tent in which we will stay in those places.”28
While the priests and their assistants were not to furnish any special creature comforts, they were asked to prepare for the Bishop’s arrival by gathering answers to two questionnaires that they received along with the pastoral letter. The first of the questionnaires was directed to the priests themselves, but in the case of rural doctrinas or añejos that were irregularly staffed, it stipulated that provincial corregidores were to interview “the most learned landowners or city-dwellers,” meaning well-to-do Spaniards or mestizos, and occasionally Indians.29 These questions were to inform Martínez Compañón of standard ecclesiastical matters, such as whether the priests worked alone or with the assistance of a subordinate priest (often known as a vicario). This questionnaire (see Appendix 1 for a transcription) also asked for information on church finances, including whether the priests supported only themselves with their benefice, or if other family members lived from the same income as well. If the parish was home to any cofradías, or religious brotherhoods,
