A significant aspect of the friar’s efforts to control the natives and impose Christianity on them involved attempts to control their sexuality and impose upon them new standards of love, sex, and marriage. In many ways, the two efforts were seen as identical: if the pagan natives could be made to abandon their licentious attitudes towards sexuality and marriage, then the adoption of chaste and moral Christianity would be almost automatic — or at least far easier.
Women in particular were circumscribed in their ability to act, partially out of concern about how people might react:
- “At the missions, women were further limited by ecclesiastical concerns about impropriety. Church authorities in New Spain advised the Alta California priests to limit their contact with women at the missions. Appearances could take their own reality. In an 1807 circular to the priests at the California missions, Father Vincente Francisoco de Sarria...cautioned the missionaries to keep in mind “how wicked it is to deal with persons of the opposite sex in a familiar way.” The order demanded that the priests not “keep suspicious company, nor take advice from women, desiring not only that we be chaste, but that we appear to be so before [other] men.”
Of course, the fact that there were many instances of inappropriate contact may have had something to do with the concern with the “image” of priests. Even the very presence of women at the missions could often be the result of force and kidnapping:
- “In the initial recruitment phases, evangelization stratagems included capturing indigenous women and children in order to attract their parents or spouses. ...“The padres would erect a hut and light candles to say mass,” observed [Lorenzo] Asisara, “and the Indians, attracted by the lights — thinking they were stars — would approach, and soon be taken.”“
In the end, the aim was to ensure that native women were bound to men — Spanish or native — in traditional Christian marriages:
- “Christianization and Hispanicization converged in the institution of marriage, which, in the eyes of the friars and the Crown, provided the antidote to a “heathen” condition that permitted or encouraged unchasteness, infidelity, and polygamy.“
Bouvier‘s book is about much more than simply the role of religion in the colonization of California and the subjugation of its native population, especially the women. It’s also an informative work on how gender ideology can shape social, political, and religious attitudes. Bouvier is able to make abundantly clear that Spanish attitudes about gender roles and sexuality cannot be separated from how they thought about conquest, colonization, and the natives themselves.
Bouvier explains, for example, the manner in which “the fictional representation of California as pagan, as well as female, hierarchically governed, and easily subdued, reinforced the conquerors' imagined superiority.” Christians were superior to pagans, soldiers were superior to natives, men were superior to women, and those in superior positions had the authority to impose themselves in a variety of ways upon everyone else.
Bouvier’s book would appear to be designed for a rather narrowly defined academic audience, but I don’t think that‘s true — at least, it shouldn’t be true. The specific topic might be rather narrow and of interest to a relatively small number of people, but the implications are far-reaching and significant. Anyone at all interested in the ways in which ideologies about gender, marriage, sexuality, and religion interact will find material here they will want to read.
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