The Alternativa: A Study in Spanish-Creole Relations in Seventeenth-Century Peru

Abstract

Within recent years there has been increasing interest in those aspects of Spanish American history which represent a growing political consciousness among the inhabitants of those lands especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Perhaps nowhere can the growth of this sentiment be studied with greater ease than in the religious orders. By their development, the religious orders, the Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, and Mercedarians, came to consist almost exclusively of criollos (descendants of Europeans born in America) and Chapetones (friars born in Europe, in particular in Spain): the two groups which were to be the leaders of the two contending parties in the wars of independence. The ultimate estrangement of these two groups developed during the colonial period in the course of which the rising creole desire to manage their own affairs encountered increasing opposition from the Spanish Crown. The encounters were not always peaceful. The participants, on both sides, in good faith held to their principles with a deep conviction of which the incidental vehemence is perhaps the clearest proof. Neither side yielded readily. This is true also of the friars.