With the order for the expulsion of the Society of Jesus issued by the King of Spain in 1767, the utopia of the Jesuit missionary villages of the Southern Cone of Latin America vanished forever. The breaking of the agreement governing the ‘reductions’ or missions – under the terms of which the indigenous peoples surrendered their souls to the God imported from Europe, and in exchange saved their lives, henceforth protected by express provision of the Spanish crown – opened the way to a long night of oppression for the converted peoples of the Moxos plains. First of all they fell under the yoke of the priests of unhappy memory who replaced the Jesuits in the administration of the missions; later they suffered from the greed of the republican period, which found among the native peoples slave labour to oil the wheels of the capitalist system that took possession of Bolivia.
But the Jesuits left an indelible mark, because the indigenous peoples, without any obligation to do so, continued to embrace the Catholic faith and grasped, of their own free will, the cultural expressions they had inherited from the missionaries, the most important of which was music.
The powerful cultural influence exercised in the music schools of the missions, whose members added to the splendour of religious celebrations, did not guarantee that European art music would sound as it did on its continent of origin. This was chiefly because the indigenous peoples of Moxos already had music and dance imprinted on their genes. A number of Jesuit sources of the time refer to their natural inclination towards festive celebration as an authentic form of communal expression, a practice predating the arrival of the missionaries, although the symbiosis that occurred between indigenous creativity and the elements imported from the Old World enriched their cultural patrimony. Their harmonious relationship with nature, their way of life and their worldview were always reflected in their artistic manifestations. If the native populations of Bolivian Amazonia accepted a foreign religion – voluntarily or under persuasion – and adapted with relative meekness to the structures set up by the Jesuits, perhaps it was because they already knew this God of whom the good fathers had come to speak to them, even though their cultural heritage had made them imagine differently. The adaptation was mutual and the Jesuits consented to it, perhaps to serve their strategic interests, or perhaps because the indigenous peoples were not passive subjects and thus left their stamp on the functioning of the reductions, subtly remodelling the European innovations to incorporate them into local traditions and realities.
The powerful cultural influence exercised in the music schools of the missions, whose members added to the splendour of religious celebrations, did not guarantee that European art music would sound as it did on its continent of origin. This was chiefly because the indigenous peoples of Moxos already had music and dance imprinted on their genes. A number of Jesuit sources of the time refer to their natural inclination towards festive celebration as an authentic form of communal expression, a practice predating the arrival of the missionaries, although the symbiosis that occurred between indigenous creativity and the elements imported from the Old World enriched their cultural patrimony. Their harmonious relationship with nature, their way of life and their worldview were always reflected in their artistic manifestations. If the native populations of Bolivian Amazonia accepted a foreign religion – voluntarily or under persuasion – and adapted with relative meekness to the structures set up by the Jesuits, perhaps it was because they already knew this God of whom the good fathers had come to speak to them, even though their cultural heritage had made them imagine differently. The adaptation was mutual and the Jesuits consented to it, perhaps to serve their strategic interests, or perhaps because the indigenous peoples were not passive subjects and thus left their stamp on the functioning of the reductions, subtly remodelling the European innovations to incorporate them into local traditions and realities.
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