The Southern Cone

From 1609 the Jesuit order built reducciones among the Guarani of the Parana basin, self governing mission townships that taught Catholic doctrine in the Guarani language itself rather than displacing it, sheltered their residents from the slave raiding that plagued the wider frontier, and grew populous and prosperous enough to unsettle colonial authorities. Spain expelled the Jesuits from its American territories in 1767, and the reductions declined fast without their administration, but the Guarani Catholicism the missions had built did not disappear with them, persisting in Paraguay in a form still recognizably shaped by that century and a half of mission life.

Araucania answered colonization differently. Mapuche resistance held the Spanish crown to a rough frontier at the Biobio River for close to three centuries, and only the Chilean and Argentine campaigns of the 1880s, remembered on each side of the Andes under different names, finally broke Mapuche political independence. Mapuche religious life outlasted that defeat, the ngillatun renewal ceremony still led today by the machi, an office the reductions to the north never had an equivalent for, a continuity the Jesuit story, for all its own endurance, cannot claim in the same unbroken way.