The aftermath of the Jesuit expulsion in 1767 and its effect upon the socioeconomic structure of northern New Spain’s missions are only beginning to be examined. This study by Cynthia Radding, regional historian for INAH in Hermosillo, concentrates on one group of missions, those of the Pimería Alta, and constitutes a solid contribution based on archival research.
The author is primarily concerned with analyzing how, from 1768 to 1850, mission pueblos with a communal agricultural base were converted into mestizo towns integrated into the Mexican governmental structure and characterized by private ownership of property. Although administrative shifts (from the Jesuits, to royal commissaries, to the Franciscans, to the ayuntamiento) influenced the process of change, the most crucial factors were the steady influx of gente de razón into the area and the growth of a regional market. Both brought increasing pressure upon mission lands and labor, contributed to the Indian depopulation of mission towns, and finally resulted in eradicating the economic base of the missions.
Although the administrative milieu was different, the process of mission secularization described by Radding for the Pimería Alta in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries may well be applicable to other areas in earlier periods of Spanish rule where similar factors combined to undermine the mission as an economic institution.
