As a new generation explores the meaning of Spain in America, the historiography of the enterprise is being elaborated on in a number of different ways. The spatial shift of inquiry from imperial cores to imperial peripheries is now being complemented by a tendency to focus thematically on aspects of empire previously inadequately understood or poorly represented. But the forward motion proceeds slowly. The pioneering efforts of Murdo MacLeod, William Sherman, and a handful of others notwithstanding, Spanish Central America still seems unmapped when compared with Mexico and Peru. Our having too few records has long impoverished our knowledge of the colonial church. This book, therefore, is an important (if curiously mistitled) contribution on two counts: the author charts the work of a neglected institution in a backwater land whose colonial experience, period by period, place by place, remains elusively beyond our ken.
An erudite introduction prepares the reader for six well-crafted discussions of ecclesiastical imperialism in varying guise. Chapter 1, at 40 pages the lengthiest and most stimulating in the book, reconstructs the geography of spiritual conquest with flair and insight. Van Oss depicts the emergence in Guatemala of an Indian “west” and a Ladino “east,” discernible by the second half of the sixteenth century after the initial successes of congregación, as the inevitable outcome of Christianizing thrusts in the former direction by regular clergy and in the latter by their secular counterparts. Chapter 2 examines the physical and social characteristics of parish structure. For a geographer, these two chapters, replete with a score of maps, tables, and illustrations, indicate an awareness of the importance of environment and place variation most historians could learn from. Chapter 3 scrutinizes how parishes functioned as fiscal units, and details the myriad ways in which the clergy exacted tribute for their services without subjecting Indians to the tithe. What village churches looked like and how they were run internally by cofradías form the focus of chapter 4. The secularization of the regular church in the course of the eighteenth century is dealt with in chapter 5 and a collective biography of parish clergy is pieced together in chapter 6. An elegant conclusion crisply summarizes major findings and notes that the decline of the clergy in Guatemala during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries parallels the rise to political ascendancy of the military. Less a “parish history”—these must surely be written, in the style of Gerardo Aguirre and Bruno Frisón, one by one—than a history of parish formation and composition, van Oss’s book, despite its incongruous subtitle, is a significant addition to the field.
A review can serve many purposes. In the present case, it must pass also as an obituary, for Adriaan van Oss died, at age 36, shortly after transforming bis doctoral dissertation into the manuscript of this book. I met him only once, when research interests brought us together in the Archivo General de Centro América in Guatemala City. He struck me as culto without being seco, quiet and unassuming in his carriage, possessed of an inquiring mind and firmly committed to the practice of good history. His untimely death has deprived the field of a bright talent, one that would have helped illuminate, in particular, the darkness of colonial Guatemala.
