By Fernando Gomez (Romance Studies, Duke University, USA).

Early Modern Utopianism fundamentally means the implementation of a regulated society. In classic utopias, two concepts are crucial: autarky and internal clockwork structuring of social roles and duties. In this epochal vision, we have, on one hand, the desire for relative separation and independence from a hostile outside, which translates into relative and fragile conditions of exceptionality and privilege, hence the persistent figure of the island. On the other hand, we have the increasing inclination, even titillation, towards a strict and inflexible departmentalization of duties and joys, or better negotium and otium, hence the rigor of six working hours for every islander. Far from any anarchic randomness, Early Modern reformism finds politically desirable social patterns of regularity and predictability, synchronicity and sameness. In the words of James Harrington, the structuring of commonwealth upon the natural principle of the same is justice. To attain the goal of uniform egalitarianism, the construction of the utopian landscape is strictly predicated upon non-psychological and faceless, radically non-individual features, which may strike the contemporary sensibility of some as cold, arid and unwelcoming impositions unless we are willing to highlight the primordial utopian emphasis on the structural satisfaction of communal need. To name but some examples: In the Morean money-free and non-existing island of happiness, utopians must eat in magnificent public halls dressed in identical white coarse woolen thread; in Tommaso Campanellas City of the Sun (1623), the great Metaphysician imposes names on the inhabitants according to their most salient quality, regulation of (re)production duties are allocated according to astrological observations; Francis Bacons New Atlantis (1627), a truly magnificent storehouse and alchemists paradise, is also an incredible social laboratory where bird flight imitations, dissections, organ transplants and resuscitations are within the realm of the ordinary, chemical and genetic combinations are put to the most efficient production of all species; Harringtons modelic Oceana (1656) is a rather tedious formalist legalism of thirty sections or orders that leave no chance to social improvisation and experiment since manners that are rooted in men bow the tenderness of a commonwealth coming up by twigs unto their bent. In the Hispanic tradition, the thin connection to tierra firme of Sinapia, precise austral antipode of the Iberian peninsula, is also described in a list of thirty sections or numbers; Vasco de Quirogas death-bed treatise, Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Village-Hospitals (1565), inspired by Mores fictional account, is breath-takingly sketchy and succinct in the unambiguous ordering of an Indian commonwealth under larger colonial conditions of existence. These pages emerge in the interrogation of reformist and utopian orderings implemented by the Society of Jesus in the immediate Early Modern Latin American colonial landscape. I am focusing on the tensions existing in the Jesuit construction of a Christian and colonial subjecthood in relation to the social experiments of the Guarani communities in the Amazon region (1609-1768, according to Armanis chronology). And I am doing so by focusing on the heuristic notion of ethnic labor, or Indian labor, and with it, state tribute impositions and the theologies and fractures of an incipient money economy in the Amazon region. So, what would utopianism have meant in relation to the Early Modern and colonial Amazon region? My main objective is the interrogation of the invention--OGormans word-- of the historical conditions of (im)possibility for utopianism under larger colonial situations for the majority of the population. My analysis looks at two fundamental figures in colonial Latin America, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya and Antonio Vieira.

Case Study One: Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (Lima 1585-1652) provides in his narrative The Spiritual Conquest(1639) a testimonial recollection of the preceding forty-odd years of Jesuit intervention in what today is called Paraguay. It was during Montoyas visit to Spain twenty years before his death that Spiritual Conquest came to be produced together with important philological work such as his Tesoro de la Lengua Guaraní (1640) and Catecismo de la lengua Guaraní (1640). There is a pristine political objective in Montoyas writing: it wants to persuade the monopoly-granting powers of the Spanish Monarch, Philip lV, to favor the incipient Jesuit-implemented missions during the fiercest early years of empire establishment. The Spiritual Conquest is an unambiguously apologetic work that vindicates Jesuit missions as indispensable frontier institutions for the interests of the Spanish Crown. In relation to still fragile colonial possessions in the immense Amazon region, Montoyas Spiritual Conquest fundamentally constructs: 1/ an apparently impartial or value-free social position above the political fray for the Society of Jesus, 2/ the self-serving suggestion of ideal and most efficient candidacy of the Society of Jesus for social mediation and satisfaction of Crown interests amid unprecedented convulsions of rapacious encomendero self-interest, massive slave-raiding activities, Portuguese animosity, babelic and multi-lingual multiplicity of itinerant Indian communities suffering from a rampant decimation. In Montoyas words, the overseas interests of the absolutist state and the interests of the Jesuits are complementary, and this common good subsumes, or annihilates, the structural dialectics of Spaniards and Indians that fundamentally articulates Montoyas discourse. Against encomendero and bandeirante interests, Montoyas writing is trying to erase the likely contradictions that arise from the Jesuit construction of subjectivities which are pronounced to be Christian and colonial at the same time. Unlike Mexican Franciscanism, there is no apocalyptic gloss of social energies in the Jesuit ethos of either Montoya or Vieira. Against the deeply influential Franciscan tradition formed by treatises such as Memoriales (1555) by Motolinía to King Charles l, Historia Eclesiástica Indiana(1596) by Gerónimo de Mendieta, and Torquemadas Monarquía Indiana (1615), Montoyas less ornate and decidedly more pragmatic approach is rather preoccupied with the imminent demands of settlement establishment for Indian groups in colonial Paraguay. In the repeated gesture of traveling overseas to appeal to the highest instance of political power, Las Casas and Quiroga also did it this way, writing becomes an esentially practical matter and the fastest legal way to get things done. By contrast to European-based fictional accounts of the ideal commonwealth largely written in Latin, the Latin American-based accounts of Montoya and Vieira adopt an epistolary format in the vernacular also quite different from the legal interventions of Quiroga. Unambiguous communication of the need to allow the Indians the use of firearms during years of generalized slave trade and rampant decimation appears to Montoya, no doubt, more important than apocalyptic daydreaming in purple prose.

I would argue, however, that we must situate Montoyas writing and struggle among religious orders for the monopoly of intervention (spiritual, economic, etc) within and against this fluctuating colonial landscape1. Competing ethos of colonization indeed: the widely disseminated Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian mission enterprises in colonial Latin America against the more targetted and calculated approach of the Jesuits. In contrast to the extensive coverage of Franciscans, and the magnificence of their discursive practices2, Mörner speaks of the Jesuit failures in Florida and on the Atlantic coast farther north in the late 1560s (Mörner, pp. 11, 28-29). The Amazon region represented an alternative. Despite the initial common perception that the Amazon region initially offered little or no economic attraction in terms of precious metals, great expectations for gold or a second Potosi already vasnished by 1639, what is today called Paraguay nonetheless became a targetted area for Jesuit intervention. Wealth was elsewhere: the preservation and efficient possession of ethnic labor.

Montoyas political position is unambiguous from the very start: self-appointed mediation. His writing clearly repudiates the uncontrolled rapacity of the encomienda system and the official institution of forced labor (servicio personal) that is decimating the indigenous communities (p. 40). In a narrative intended to arouse political sympathy, this anti-encomienda position is said to promote the common good of both Indians and Spaniards (p. 1343). However, this all-encompassing common good is far from self-evident. It is also not easy for the reader to discern concrete and meaningful differences regarding the labor structuring implemented by the encomienda system and the labor structuring inside the Jesuit missions (precarious and fragile enclaves by definition in a frontier exchange economy and almost permanent war situation). The accounts of the former tend largely to concentrate on official legalities and technicalities, incomplete tabulations, when not approximations to largely dysfunctional and chaotic colonial situations of abuse. Detailed accounts of structured ethnic labor inside the Jesuit missions do not, for the most part, exist. And when they do, they most come from Jesuit sources4. In either case, reconstruction is painful and laborious and the assertions tentative until further data appears. We must not forget a difference in dimension: the encomienda institution in the borderzone Amazon region as of 1639, vastly unregulated from an imperial viewpoint, constituted the hegemonic and largest Latin American landscape within and against which Jesuit missions presumably resisted and opposed a relative resistance and opposition,at least according to Montoyas words. We should not forget the historical irony that had the Monarch as the principal encomendero, the name was not rejected, and the largest beneficiary of ethnic labor arranged in mita (or rotary and compulsory mine-serving duties) and yanaconaje (or ethnic-based assemblage of forced labor)5. In the imaginary reconstruction of the praxis of the majority of the population, the category of ethnic labor (or human wealth) appears to be among the most convincing ones in our efforts to see the fundamental fight for political desire in the colonial Amazon region.

In coming to terms with the colonial structuring of labor, it is crucial to highlight the very low and slow circulation of money --or third element in human and social exchange-- in the Amazon region. By 1639, colonial Paraguay represents a partially uncharted and murky territory where the slow colonial domestication of itinerant neolithic indigenous groups into a largely barter sedentary agricultural economy is taking place. The Amazon region represents the challenging scenario of the fight between the stronger colonial culture of the land and sedentary agrarian settlements (sementeras implemented by Crown, Jesuit and encomendero competing interests) against the murky background of non-urban autochthonous desolations and wastelands (soledades), runaways and mass migrations constantly threatened by destructive bandeirante unpredictability. The investigation of colonial mechanisms of force (or state imposition) must take into account two fundamental components: 1) tribute, 2) labor. And, 3) the colonial conflation of the two. Montoya speaks of the frequent use of the so-called Paraguayan herb (p. 40) in satisfaction of the payment of tribute. In theory, every male Indian over 13 years of age, as vassal to the Crown, must comply with state regulations and pay tribute, i.e. ideally produce money, or, due to its scarcity, produce an appropriate load of herbal substitute. Quite literally, curious persons have made the experiment of weighing an Indian against his load on a scale: even with many additional pounds on the Indians side he did not outweigh his heavy load. How many have been left dead beside their loads, the Spaniard less concerned over the poor Indians death than at having no one to carry the load! (p. 41). This state imposition being unavoidable, the colonial structure of Spanish-Indian interaction will become unbearably hierarchical around the lability of the notion of ethnicity: Indians take the brunt of the imperial establishment of an ideally regulated colonial state (ideal, from official and homogenizing imperial structures in opposition to inefficiently regulated encomienda interests). Money, the depersonalized third element of human transaction and so soon the inevitable reference point thus surfaces as the ideal measuring rod for Crown interest. Money finds its main threat in the scarcity of currency in the Amazon region. To make social matters more volatile,

compulsory imposition to work (or forced labor) comes to the rescue of the tribute-based social exchange. If the structural needs of the absolutist state and encomienda demand satisfaction, labor fundamentally comes in the extreme form of imposition in the nothing in return, or work for free so to speak, or less likely under wage labor which, again due to the scarcity of money, may often require any other available money substitute. In most cases, however, paying (money, herb , cloth substitute or something else) and working for others for a certain amount of time, regulated or not, will amount to much of the same thing. This system will become, due to its formlessness, an exceedingly flexible and abusive situation that the Crown and the Jesuits are trying to keep under control.

In structurally dysfunctional and unregulated situations, should the law be the horizon, conditions of force and imposition (or forms of payment) increase, and correspondingly the toil for life (work) of the subaltern sectors (subaltern, my tentative definition, the social situation that engenders uneven conditions of imposition and asymmetrical gradations until the extreme point of alienation and physical destruction of human bodies). On the other hand, the ideal situation of standardized wage labor would also be ideally paid in substitutive form: cloth or linen, but not always6 (and again, ideal from the viewpoint of homogenizing state structures since technically, there is no possible way out of state impositions7). In any case, the final dismantling of yanaconaje, and eventually of the encomienda system8, followed the general tendency of increasing suppleness of the work unit. Free and freedom, perhaps valid synonyms for utopianism, would appear to have ideally meant non-yanaconaje and non-mita labor force for temporary hire and the ideal retribution of a previously stipulated money arrangement by all the parties involved (presumably, equal parties). Free Indians in so far as vassals, and later citizens, were of course tributary to the Crown and the free status would have ideally passed to next generations. Mestizaje might have helped to this (Susnik, (1)51, 204, 203). The institutional attribution of freedom to the individual worker-unit (or pieza) of the peón jornalero unattached to any social grouping other than this increasing flexibility of migratory labor structuring rather betrays a global monetarization process of most social exchanges (Susnik, (1)34). As early as 1654, Vieira is already talking of these money-fractured human units (peças que se levarem ao sertão para os ditos resgates..., proposal XV). This individuality does not mean, however, that abuse stopped and that freedom, whatever this category may mean, increased (Susnik, (2)83)). The ideal situation of hired and justly paid wage labor, if justice must necessarily be predicated upon the economic horizon of payment, was not happening for the most part in most of colonial Paraguay, which we could envisage as a fundamentally incipient agrarian economy imposed upon authochthonous itinerant communities, a largely dysfunctional and still fragile globalizing imperial state against strong encomienda interests, massive bandeirante destruction and resisting runaway slaves, itinerant indigenous communities and the large shadow of money economy as the early accounts of Montoya and Vieira intimate. The essential Jesuit call is for the regulation of this all-pervasive dysfunctionality that is cutting through social energies to the extreme degree of decimation of large sectors of population. Against idealist approaches, it appears beyond reasonable doubt that it is forced labor (the notion of servicio personal denounced by Montoya), still largely unaffected by money intromission that which constituted the fundamental structuring of Amazon economics during colonial times (Susnik, (1)138). The state and the encomienda institution interpellated all male individuals over 13 years of age to produce satisfactory tribute every year (this interpellation is radically non-negotiable). The material translation of this interpellation resulted into mita and yanaconaje arrangements to satisfy the non-negotiable state imposition. In most cases, this work was paid in food, cloth to provide for a bare physical subsistence, or even for free. Uneffective regulation, when not deregulation, does not appear to benefit the many. Always operating within the horizon of dysfunctional legalisms, Montoya speaks of the individual tribute of five hollow weights (peso hueco or quite literally, the shadow of money), and its alternative of one months service. In an us v. them logic, Montoya locates in the same tight knot the proper political desire of the Monarch, whom God protects, the political desire of the judge don Francisco de Alfaro, and the Jesuits, in contradiction to the particularized desire of the encomenderos. Against all odds, it is the latter who have their way against the truly imposing, yet dysfunctional entente cordiale of the former (p. 41-2). This global colonial commonwealth thus turned upside down, the encomienda force stronger over the tripartite coincidence of the proper and orthodox desire, Montoyas reformist denunciations horn with the dysfunctionality of the colonial state. In his view, unregulated encomendienda system --not encomienda per se and this inflection is crucial-- is the fundamental cause of the internal destructuring of the Crown interests of the overseas commonwealth. And, once again, we must stress the structural flexibility of articulation as well as the taboo, for Montoya, the non-questionable condition of state imposition: tax tribute, hollow weight of herb or something else, and forced labor or militia service remain well in place as nothing else but proper social exchange. The monopolized regulation of the potential wealth of Indian labor is what constitutes the central battlefield among political sectors in a largely land-centered agriculture-based implantation of colonialism. The social party that manages to preserve and regulate this human wealth will have the upperhand in the region. For the Jesuits, colonial Mexico is largely gone. Peru remains a stronghold that might find a pathway into the Plata Region. With or without Christian rhetoric, I would argue that this economic center is the political gist in Montoyas narrative. Never quite raising his voice against the largest corruption of the colonial state, Montoyas writing is however quite eloquent about dysfunctional lawlessness, or state corruption. The Jesuit construction of identities, which simultaneously call themselves Christian and colonial, finds the unambiguous repudiation of anomie. What Montoya does not want to see happening (or Montoyas evil) is not imperial conditions of impositions to work for free, or money or herb substitute, but dysfunctional imperialism or lawlessness. The evil fundamentally refers to the adjective dysfunctional. Montoyas reformism scrupulously operates within the Early Modern horizon of civilizing and imperial domination. For the Jesuits, imperial colonization was as inevitable as desirable an enterprise, truly a mission, but only if brought under some effective and regulated orderly forms of social control 9.

For the most part, the colonial juxtaposition of tribute and forced labor (tribute-as-forced labor) is the central object of the utopian reformism of the Spanish Jesuit. Montoya would describe, for example, how often the Indians ended up with their properties seized by officials and paying double tribute, ten pesos and the most likely alternative of two months of personal service. The imposition to pay money translates into the imposition to give the human energy contained in the body for a certain period of time. Ineffective regulation works for those who directly benefit from the imposition. Abuse regarding the timing of the imposition/payment increases: the itinerant quality of the personal service (or mita) worsens the situation. Forced labor becomes debt labor. Montoyas descriptions are quite eloquent as to how sometimes the Indians must travel for twenty days and sixty leagues and forced by fear or harsh compulsion, they must stay in personal service for three months or more instead of the stipulated one month (p. 42). Highlighting the conflation of tribute and labor around dispossessed bodies only true possession, time, and the timing of the bodily energy so to speak, Montoyas writing makes use of a cumulative technique: the most honest encomenderos --honest, a very thin word indeed-- make the Indians work for six months of the year without any pay, the less honest for ten or twelve months. In living situations of unregulated when not deregulated colonialism, the category time, the bodys possession, is stretched to reach the extreme point of round-the-clock limb exhaustion, bone fracture and destruction. And, the description would continue, on top of the double tribute, some Indians get cheated out of the regular wage labor. Instead of the law-standard of a real and a half per day, or forty-five per month, they get paid less while the tribute is, like a bad joke, increased to a debt status. Working hours become working months, until twelve months, and the idealform of payment, ideal qua stipulated, thins out to bare physical subsistence and almost nothing10. In Spiritual Conquest, freedom for the majority of the population, freedom an empty yet desirable category to be filled, subsumes under the horizon of previously arranged payment among non-hierarchical parties, truly a dream for the many (p.42). The early years of colonialism in the Amazon region created fluctuating and unstable new hierarchies, yet hierarchies nonetheless, which made this kind of ideal payment largely a distant dream for the many. It is a nightmarish Catch-22 situation that finds its logic in the imperial landscape larger than particularized encomienda interests. Abusing the plasticity of barter economy, the encomienda system interferes with this structuring thereby deepening already existing state or Crown impositions by placing a double burden against the interests of the many. There are at least two Ceasers instead of one: encomendero interests and the interests of the Crown or centralized state, still largely fragile and ineffective by 1636. Spiritual Conquest claims to deviate from the pervasive corruption as the dysfuntional norm by appealing to the highest authority, the King himself. Via Montoya, the Jesuits seemingly put themselves above the political fray as the ideal mediators (it is a spiritual conquest after all). Spiritual Conquest is fundamentally intended as a mediation among dynamic cultural complexes in order to promote the exemplary singularity of European-centered Christian civilization and Crown or state interest (surely, the nominal goods and taboos left untouched by Montoya11). Surely the reputation as great linguists helped the Jesuits appoint themselves to the role of ideal communicators coming to the rescue of the common good of a truly transatlantic and plur-ilingual commonwealth. In Montoyas views, there is ultimately no social contradiction: the common good of the commonwealth under colonialism is the desire of the Monarch and this reason of state is the impenetrable political good to be endorsed and promoted, if only nominally. The process of regulation and ordering (utopianism) is the one and only way to construct an ideal commonwealth which is fundamentally covered by the largely ineffective laws of imperial colonization and globalizing Christianity. Montoyas utopian reason is largely complicit with imperial reason and both reasons are called Christian. For Montoya, the promotion of this political good is the exclusive and right thing to do. Those who are destroying the common good are the encomenderos and the bandeirantes. Colonial possession should not be questioned and abandoned, but rather better possessed and more productively so by means of a Jesuit-implemented apparently value-free and neutral regime that regulates, in clockwork fashion, bodies, products and the traffic of both, as well as the primordial attendance to the scrupulous payment of all state needs. Inside the lettered city of the official political dictum, Montoya is attacking legal dysfunctionality, or pervasive malfeasance. Wanting to change malfeasance into clockwork and scrupulous sense of duty, Montoyas first-hand account to the King capitalizes on the sweat and blood of the defenseless Indians --his phrasing-- mainly in so far as these constitute the main source of state wealth and profit (no Potosi gold in Paraguay). In a bandeirante landscape where 60,000 missionized people had been made prisoners (p. 128), Montoya petitions in Spiritual Conquest the concrete political goal of temporary tax-and-labor exemption to all missionized Indians who then must turn into potential militia borderline patrolmen (p. 128). Thanks to this intervention, Indians are thus fenced off from forced labor on condition of prompt attendance to presumably punctual and targetted military service. The Jesuit-implemented frontier institution would thus come to the fore as check-points within the vast Amazon political landscape in order to properly channel the otherwise free-floating social energy, currently capitalized upon by stronger encomendero rapacity. In compensation, the prerogative of temporary tax exemption for the missionized Indians receives the footnote of militia duty in case of war. Thus, the Indians must respond to state rhetorics of force and compulsion not with money or work but with the eventual loss of the only possesion of a subaltern body, its life. Well into the Seventeenth century in borderline situations as Jesuits letters certify, the exceptional and unpredictable case of war is the normal state of being. The sweat and blood may thus truly go full circle in yet another transformation that does not fail to satisfy state impositions: Indians will literally have to put their lives on the fireline for the colonizing interests of the Crown if so ordered. Not a socio-economic account, the Spiritual Conquest mostly follows the catechistic narrative format of nameless and faceless exemplary lives in the first encounter with the Eurocentered and globalizing Christianity. Almost in the blind Morean egalitarianism of having seen one city, you have seen them all, the hasty and interchangeable description of 25 missions provided in Spiritual Conquest may at times however strongly suggest a precarious and relatively bearable commonwealth inside the larger colonial disorder 12 . Montoyas rhetorics of omission may prove convincing to a King already convinced of the chaos of the encircling encomienda system. As in Vieiras account, the apparent clear demarcation of the outside of the mission enclave and an intimation of an orderly inside vanishes in the fluctuating borderline economy in which institutional compulsion of migrant labor, mita and yanaconaje or militia duties were surely not the exception but the norm. Rather than distant and marginalized enclaves, mission institutions must instead be conceptualized as nodal points of social intersections in early structurings of imperial establishment.

Established in compliance with the dictates of Crown and the Popes blessings

(prerogatives and monopolies had already been granted as early Nov. 26, 1609, but remained largely dysfunctional by 1639), mission institutions did not take place despite, let alone against, the largest official colonial structuring of the new world. In neither Montoya nor Vieira are mission enterprises conceptualized as anti-colonial or post-colonial structurings of a commonwealth. Rather they become para-colonial enclaves instrumental to imperial structures. In other words, these enclaves came with their own internal conditions of imposition in a, if you wish, more manageable and humane fashion, which we might see in the relative autonomy of legal privilege and desire for economic self-sufficiency. That is, it is perfectly possible to envisage Jesuit enclaves as colonial institutions, colonial in the double sense of taking place during colonial times and also in the sense of reinforcing coercive situations of social control, perhaps by other means than the largely deregulated and blatantly savage state of the least honest encomenderos. And yet these measures also appear colonial through and through in that, always according to the consulted literature, also come from minority sectors in the vicinity to political privilege and thus cannot but fail to advance conditions of impositions for the majority of the population in a non-negotiable and hierarchical manner13. There is no need to kill willingly subaltern sectors, no one willingly destroys his/her own sources of wealth, to be associated to, or even called if only tentatively, colonizer. It is for this reason that an enterprise announced as spiritual conquest --or colonization of the imaginary-- and the three-dimensional apparatus of the structuring of ethnic labor were never really radically questioned by Montoya, and also Vieira, in the first place. For Montoya, attenuation of the brutal conquest of the non-Western and non-Christian world was the right thing to do. Inside this Amazon oceanic feeling of unregulated brutality, Montoya draws inspiration from an agricultural and precapitalist seminary life as regards his descriptions of missionized life. It is precisely Montoyas picturesque rendition of Jesuit missions and the seemingly bloodless dismantling of authochthonous Amazon cultures what constitutes, I would argue, the semantic foundation of the routinized account that passes for utopianism in most of the literature on missions even among secular authors (Caraman, Cunninghame, Medina Ruiz, Reiter to name but few). Against the rapacity of encomenderos and bandeirantes, Montoyas construction of utopian agrarian islands (or sementeras) in the oceanic Amazon non-urban landscapes (or soledades) is a charming vita beata:

They all raise food, and each man has his own plot. When past eleven years of age, boys have a plot of their own. Upon these they very cooperatively assist each other. They neither buy nor sell, for they freely and unselfishly help each other in their needs, and show great generosity to people passing through. Accordingly, there is no theft; they live in peace and without quarrels. Throughout the year they hear Mass at daybreak and go to work from church. This holy preparation is very successful. While the sacrament of confession is received from the start, Communion is put off for a number of years, more for some and fewer for others. For while their capacity for learning matters of faith and mechanical arts is well known, the resistance among the older people is considerable (p. 131).

The goodness of this garden of Christianity, as Reiter puts it, is unmistakably ordered according to Jesuit interpretation of the Catholic dictum: regulations of bodies and minds in the prohibition of drunkenness (p. 132), the control of reproduction in the prohibition of concubinage (p.132), the imported European frame of couple arrangement in indissoluble marriage, and the enforcement of chastity, any lapses against it that may be discovered are met with effective correction and exemplary punishment (p. 132)14. The declared goal of giving shape to an excellent civilized commonwealth (p. 132) coincides with the speakers position, the Jesuits. The manufacturing of a presumably selfless and communal arrangement of peoples and goods according to need, and we should not forget the three-dimensional dimension of selling the mission enterprise to the best royal customer overseas, appears yet little touched by the slow predations of market economy thanks largely to the official prohibitions to the Spaniards to penetrate the area (p. 132). Among encomenderos and bandeirantes, this hothouse enclosure is not to occur for too long around massively fluctuating and intersecting borders of tax-and-labor impositions, impositions which are reconfiguring the Amazon region with the dynamism of primitive capital accumulation. An intent look soon finds out in Jesuit missions internal hierarchical asymmetries, uneven exercise of duties and prohibitions and condescending Jesuit paternalism. Thus, it becomes evident that the collaboration of state interests and Jesuit interests operate together in a common fight against encomendero interests, Indian runaways from Jesuit missions and also against, this must be stressed, the double consideration of mission as precarious and temporary enclave and incursion or foray into the wilderness. The inside (or the presumed social goodness of the Utopian island) and the larger hostile and colonial outside are radically part of the same universe that gives conditions of possibility to both shifting sides (like sides of the same coin). Paying attention to multiple variables and gradations, intensities and conditions of imposition, the general landscape, of which mission structures were intrinsically one part, appears to be colonialism. The phrasing used to adorn the general landscape or the details of that landscape is another matter15. The Early Modern and colonial deregulated structuring of bodies and minds meets with the partial solution, according to Montoya, in the Jesuit-implemented structuring of bodies and minds that purportedly bring largely ineffective regulation down to an ordered colonial state of Crown and Jesuit profit (surely the writer never consciously writes against his/her (un)declared interests). A stricter control of bodies and minds of the subaltern sectors to preserve their lives and their subalternity is proposed to the Monarch. Montoya is requesting for the missionized and baptised Indians a royal prerogative of ten-year tax exemption, bracketting them off temporarily as it were from the unparalleled yoke of personal service (p. 132). Bandeirante watching and militia duties remain in place as a tribute compensation as well as occasional satisfaction of the itinerant labor imposition (mita). Christianity provides social mediation at this juncture. Christian baptism provides the Indians with the appropriate identity card that makes them legal and equal vassals inside the Crown domains (today we might call this, autochthonous peoples made permanent residents with second-class working permits). Clinging to this thin technicality, the death-causing measure of personal service is thus theoretically arrested in Montoyas 1636 insistent conflation of Crown and Jesuists interests. Putting himself as a qualified witness, Montoya defends the non-profit interest of the Jesuits as regards the missions (p. 133). Doing it almost for the good of it, Jesuit rhetorics of social neutrality is said to come to the rescue of the global commonwealth. With conventional invocations to Christian rhetoric, Montoyas writing manages to achieve the temporary suspension of forced labor for missionized Indians and the commitment to borderline patrol that should keep the predations of encomenderos and bandeirantes at bay. Once pacified the Amazon region, the carving out of an intensely regulated autarky for the Jesuits over this now declared free Indian labor, also temporarily attending to mita impositions, is the fundamental political desire that gives form and spirit to Spiritual Conquest. This Indian freedom does not cost nothing to the so-called Indians. If only by omission, colonial state imposition is pronounced to be desirable and good. Desire for reform is mainly referred to situated and detailed dysfunctionality of particularized articulations of the colonial state. This is the ultimate horizon of meaning that Montoya did not, perhaps could not, challenge in the narrow discursive space of Spiritual Conquest. And, this is my proposal, this larger frame is the fundamental tension that we here today must explore. He --the King-- who does colonialism cannot at the same time talk convincingly about the ideal commonwealth, unless we miss the potential structural hypocrisy of the three-dimensional situation. Those in complicity with colonial praxis --the Jesuits as made clear in Montoyas narrative but not in his words-- truly cannot be taken at face value either as regards transatlantic constructions of the ideal commonwealth despite what short-term measures might suggest, but only initially.

Case Study Two: Antonio Vieira (Lisbon 1608-Salvador, Brazil 1697), Jesuit missionary, orator, diplomat, and master of classical Portuguese prose played an active role in both Portuguese and Brazilian history. His sermons, letters, and state papers provide a valuable index to the climate of opinion of the Seventeenth-century world. He enters the Jesuit Order in 1623, is ordained Jesuit in 1635 and soon became the most popular and influential preacher in the Portuguese colony. Like Montoya, he was a renowed linguist: He knew Tupí-Guaraní, a number of local Amazon dialects and the Kimbundu language of the black slaves. He did extensive mission work until 1641 in the states of Pará and Maranhão in Brazil. He was sent on a mission to Portugal to congratulate King John lV on his accession. He undertook an intense diplomatic work between 1646-1650 in Europe. During these years, he secured monopoly for the Jesuits that would protect the Brazilian Indians from enslavement. He returns triumphantly to Brazil in 1655 doing further mission work until 1661. Problems with the Inquisition led to his imprisionment during 1665-67. On his release, he went to Rome in 1668 to labor for relief of the persecuted Portuguese Jews. He became Provincial of his Order in 1688. He dies in 1697 at the age of 89. Encyclopedic literature considers him a fighter for the freedom of the Indians and a advanced advocate for racial tolerance.

On the other fluctuating side of empire establishment, Vieiras proposals provide a consistent correlation to Montoyas. Both writers, qua members of an internationally prestigious elite institution, had privileged access to the pinnacle of political power and this vicinity made these proposals for regulation a likely condition of possibility that finally got approved and implemented. As is Montoyas, Vieiras writing is fundamentally aiming at the colonial implementation of state structures. The dismantling of state structures, even non-intervention, were not options for highly influential and economically powerful Jesuit enclaves situated within the confines of a singular concept of expanding Christian civilization. In the pages that follow, I have selected fragments from two letters to the Portuguese King, João lV dated April 4, 1654 and April 6, 1654 to highlight key aspects of the Jesuit-implemented political remedies to the largely unregulated and chaotic overseas state of being for the Indian majority of the population. The epistolary format, highly meaningful by itself, provides readers with a warm tone of intimacy to the most powerful Early Modern political structures, that of the kingship, as well as a relatively more targetted and practical approach to political matters. Due to the dramatic situation described, Veiras letters represent a direct and strong plea to see immediate results. As in Montoya, the enclosure of Jesuit-implemented missions must be thoroughly regulated. Conceptualized as frontier posts, these enclaves signal the boundaries beyond which barbarism, the hostile other of Christianity, grows thick and wild far from the reach of the European-centered imagination and prestigious meaning-making in alphabetic writing. The imported social category of Indian is dismembered in Vieiras letters following the hierarchical categories of 1) missionized Indian, legal vassals to the Crown (Indians forros or partially exempted from tribute, p. 436), presumably free, yet their labor and movement subjected to a rigid control, 2) wild Indians not yet missionized or Indians beyond the boundaries of Christian civilization (os indios do sertão), and 3) legally enslaved Indians (indios em cordas, or indios de corda) in a presumably transitional state between 2) and 1) 16. As in Montoyas account, it is the religious orders who must approve, referee-like in the colonial social game, the social transactions of those Indian subcategories and the ones who must patrol the expeditions into the wilderness to reduce Indians into citizenship and jurisdiction (p. 310). Ecclesiastical people, then, are promoted to the political status of security advisors to thus monopolize and supposedly prevent abuse inside shifting colonial borderline disorders. Under the eyes of the addressee, João lV, the most powerful reader inside the Portuguese Empire to be sure, Vieira is presenting proposals for the betterment of the colonial state. This is a description of living conditions to be reformed:

Os indios, que moram em suas aldeias com títulos de livres, são muito mais

cativos que os que moram nas casas particulares dos portugueses, só com

uma diferença, que cada três anos têm um novo senhor, que é o governador

ou capitão mor que vem a estas partes, o qual se serve dêles como de seus e os

trate como alheios; em que vêm a estar de muito pior condição que os

escravos, pois ordinàriamente se ocupam em lavouras de tabaco, que é o

mais cruel trabalho de quantos há no Brasil (p. 311).

In this explanation of captivity and freedom, freedom of and for the Indians, above the bottom line of slavery, is constructed according to a strict and desirable allocation and surveillance of Indians to the Portuguese. The mestizo population (mamelucos or hybrids of Indian and white) is pronounced the main manufacturers of abuse. Making their villages ours, the Jesuit-mediated state protection comes to provide safety and protection for them and us (always inside the personalized epistolar format, João lV and Vieira). In a three-year rotary fashion, the Portuguese shall benefit from the distribution of the already protected and Christianized Indians. Yet, the abuse does not stop here since, given the current lack of regulation, even these protected Indians are also routinely abused by governors or military men in the cruelties of tobacco work. In the middle of the inhospitable landscape of barbarian wilderness, slave-raiding incursions, Spanish hostility and the particularized interests of the Portuguese encomenderos, Vieiras request to João lV is fundamentally for the taming of the wild and alien bodies of the Indians into fully regulated state property. In this mental horizon, vassalage is freedom. Yet, this freedom is not for free: it comes with certain conditions of imposition.

In his letter dated 4 April 1654, Vieira proposes several remedies: prohibitive regulation to governors, captains and intermediaries not to make use of Indians in the tobacco plantation, except, and this clause is crucial, to fufill service to the Crown (senão quando fôsse para as fortificações ou outras cousas do serviço de V.M., p. 312). The indians are made free, and the passive construction is important to Vieiras world view, by taking them out from the wilderness (sertão) and sealing them off inside civilization under exceptional tax-as-labor exemptions that include the compensatory sense of attending to military duties in borderline conflicts (normal state of being in the Amazones by 1654). And, as we already saw with Montoya, Vieira is also leaving the reason of state dangerously open to potential abuses (the anything, any single thing, of outras cousas). Vieiras writing is clearly interested in mapping out the still emerging landscape of the Amazon region and the innumerable wealth potential contained in it (os indios do sertão... inumeráveis, p. 312), rather than simply vindicating the supposed marginality of the enclosed mission enclaves. Expansion of the colonial state --mission as enterprises into the wilderness-- and the itinerant installations of frontier missionary enclaves thus appear crucial structures of social interaction inside tremendously fluctuating and murky borderlines. To political pinnacle of absolutist Monarchy, Vieiras dishes out an ideal political remedy: Christianized Indians faithful to the Crown allocated in regulated and peaceful villages arranged according to reasonable impositions of wage labor and given in monopoly to reliable, qua Jesuit, supervision. According to the orthodox institutional postulate that negates social maturity to the Indians, to which Vieiras letters certainly subscribe, the regulatory goal can only be achieved via ecclesiastical mediation. Vieiras proposals for social reform basically amount to the surveillance and control of Indians from the wilderness into villages, from barbarism into civilizational Christianity, from itinerant to sedentary practices of agriculture and from multiplicity of languages to regulatory knowledge of Portuguese, if a modest vernacular daughter of her Latin mother in Europe, one of the two imperial tongues in the Amazon region. As in Montoya, Vieira encourages the knowledge of indigenous languages (in todays words, foreign languages) in order to more effectively gain control of Indian energies for profitability to state interests:

e houver quantidade de religiosos que aprendam as línguas, e se exercitem neste ministério com verdadeiro zêlo; não há dúvida que, concorrendo a graça divina con esta disposição dos instrumentos humanos, os índios se reduzirão fàcilmente à nossa amizade, abraçarão a fé, viverão como cristaos, e com as novas do bom tratamento dos primeiros trarão êstes apos de si injúria a deus, à fé, à Igreja e a V. M., não fôssem os bárbaros das brenhas, nem outros homens inimigos ou estranhos, senão aqueles memos de quen V. M. confia os sue Estados, e a quem V. M. encomenda primeiro que tudo a conversão das almas, e lhes encarrega os meios dela so pena de caso maior! (p. 313).

The first letter ends with a petition (the cousa indigna is a polite euphemism): the abolition of the colonial abuse by calculated implementation of corrective measures addressing the current state of lack of effective regulation. The imperial machine is still, no doubt, the ideal form of commonwealth in that it brings the good, undisputed civilization in the expanding social forms of money economy, alphabetic writing, the Portuguese, city-structured communities and Christianity. It is by contast the malfunction of the imperial machine in the localized context of the colonial appendages overseas that Vieira is addressing. Vieira presents his own wish vis-a-vis the Kings, that regal regulations and prerrogatives be reinforced and that these be reinforced via Jesuit mediation.

The April 6, 1654 letter contains an orderly list of nineteen proposals to thus improve the state of affairs. Vieiras appeal to justice is fundamentally structured around the negative: the prohibition of unregulated traffic of bodies and goods that is decimating the Indians porque as injustiças que se fazem a esa pobre e miserabilíssima gente não cabem en nenhum papel(p. 432). Political agents (or governors) and military agents (or captains) are negated jurisdiction over the indigenous populations except in case of war, almost a permanent state of being in the 1654 imperial borderline situation as we have already emphasized. Vieiras proposals also speak of a hierarchical distribution of the population: Christianized Indians, today we might say visaed, will be distributed among the Portuguese

--Christian subsumes the generic national label-- according to the internal hierarchy, or quality and need of the latter (proposal l). This hierarchical structuring of the territory (capitania) should be done as follows: one major (um procurador geral), relatively independent from the jurisdiction of governors, will be appointed, and below this position, military positions (or captains) and two ecclesiastical persons will be designated with the goal to survey and keep the Indians under control17. Annually, according to a rotating mechanism, missionized Indians will be distributed per settler (morador), paying particular attention to the settlers need (the neediest among them come first,proposal ll). The labor arrangement and body movement of the missionized Indians will be subjected to the total supervision and control by the two appointed ecclesiastical persons, themselves below the maximum authority of the major and above the Portuguese settlers (proposal lll). Also annually, there will be tabulation of Indian bodies (proposal lV). Christianized (or visaed) indians will be allocated in small urban enclaves and the number of these will be kept under control for a more efficient estimation of the population and a better civilization of the Indians. Here, as in Montoya, Vieira is equating service to the state and the preservation of, and capitalization upon, Indian labor: this wealth shall be equally distributed among Portuguese citizens according to need,and by implication Indian needs are presumably to be better served this way (proposal V). The proposals also speak of regulations and restrictions regarding social exchange and the traffic of bodies and goods. The wealth (Indian labor) is kept under control: Indians cannot travel two days outside their villages, nor can they work for more than four months outside their originally assigned village (the total maximum of a four-month time unit must be dismembered in two manageable time units, proposal VI). The utopian ideal of systematic and consistent structuring of wage labor is introduced thus: payment to Indian labor shall be kept centralized in the village strongbox and two keys will be assigned, one to the Major of the village and the other to the two supervisors18. A written contract stipulating the satisfaction of the working hours and the appropiate payment shall bear public witness (proposal Vll)19. Although with the internal social hierarchies and contradictions above illustrated, Early Modern and colonial structuring of bodies and goods will strive to guarantee the clockwork regulation of satisfaction of communal need attending to the subaltern sectors: Traffic of bodies and goods will convene every fifteen days or twice a month in a pre-established money-free market place. In a truly zeroing in on communal need and simultaneous satisfaction of basic need, the lowest common and human denominator, eating, is thus attended20. Prevention of abuse in the social exchange of goods shall be implemented by the patrolling of the appointed authorities (proposal Vlll). Expeditions into the wilderness (entradas ao sertão) will be exclusively assigned to the same clergymen who already administer the mission enclaves, or to reliable military men when so stipulated by the Monarch (proposal lX). The protection of the Indians should have a desirable consistency and should ideally be assigned in monopoly to a religous order. Vieiras preference is cunningly kept in suspense for a while (proposal X). The civilizing domestication of the Indians caught from the wilderness will make them suitable for the rotating service to the assigned village and appropriate settlers (moradores). This structuring should be done without use of force or violence (proposal Xl). Enslaved Indians (índios do corda), or those Indians made captive, justly captived in Vieiras words, will be the only ones allowed expeditions into the wilderness provided they are always supervised by clergymen who would always be well-versed in indigenous languages and good theologians (bons linguas e bons teólogos, proposal Xll). Indians from the wilderness (indios do sertão), once properly baptized and converted into missionizable Indias (or indios forros), will be proportionally distributed (pro rata) among officially appointed state settlers (moradores do Estado, comencando sempre pelos mais pobres, para que tenham quem os ajude). Those in charge of the distribution will always be the maximum secular authority (Procurador geral) or the maximum authority of the appointed religious Order (proposal Xlll). A selected unit of white soldiers, called Advancement of the Faith (Propagação da fé) must always accompany the exploratory journeys into the wilderness (jornadas ao sertão) of the ecclesiastical persons and appointed Indians for their defense and security due to the dangers and the barbarians (proposal XlV). All transactions (financial, prisoner exchange, etc.) during those incursions and forays into the wilderness should be centralized in one chosen military person (proposal XV). Indians should be distributed according to maintainance and aggrandizement of the state (conservaçao e aumento do Estado), and this distribution should never be done by any forced means. Rather, it should be done, and here Vieiras writing thins out to an impossibility, respecting Indian willingness in a transaction that is beyond their means as radically non-equals (mas isto nao fazendo força ou violencia alguma aos mesmos índios, senao per vontade). Footnoting this previous attenuation of the coercive powers of the state, exceptions to the Indians exercise of free will should only be made due to exceptional circumstances and through proper and appointed military personnel (proposal XVl). To the presumable increasing availability of labor (gente de servico), orderly and economic restructuring of the number of Indian villages is advisable (proposal XVll). Village majors elect religious officials (proposal XVlll). Appointed clergymen, because of the assigned referee role in this colonial pool of social energies, cannot have any Indians directly assigned to them for personal labor (neither free Indians nor enslaved Indians), nor should they have any vested interests in the assigned villages (proposal XlX). Thus, situating the Indians, in the sense of doutrinados and sujeitos, therefore preventing the decimation, Vieira concludes the letter by intimating that the ideal monopoly of this mediation and regulation should be given to the ideal religious order: those well versed in letters, of great impartiality and tested zealousness in the salvation of souls, of true and proved virtue, of course, the Jesuits (p. 439-40). In a wonderful and intimate letter-writing circularity, the writers reformist and utopian suggestions for the betterment of colonial possession via the monopoly of surveillance duties concide with his enunciatory positioning and group belonging. If it is true that the indios-moradores dialectic is the fundamental internal structuring device by Vieira for the colonial villages, then the fundamental political operation transcends both colonial positions of indigenous and settlers in that the fundamental decision is happening elsewhere, on the Portuguese side of the Atlantic. As in Montoya, Vieiras 1654 letter fundamentally proposes measures intended to reinforce the colonization of the still largely uncharted Amazon region by assigning all social agents their proper and unmixed places (proper according to the dictum in the colonial textbook). Within this proposal, surely pleasing to Crown interests, Vieira, an intimate of João lV, also includes a monopoly clause touching on Indian labor in the truly immense Portuguese-controlled Amazones region, particularly so after the Tratado de Límites (1750). Until the expulsion from Portuguese America in 1759, the Jesuits and absolutist monarchy got what they wanted.

Conclusions. In the preceding pages, I have been investigating some salient features of the social regulation of human praxis (labor) produced by the transatlantic encounter of cultures in asymmetrical and structurally violent situations of colonialism. I have been doing so via two exemplary Jesuit testimonies, Montoya and Vieiras, analyzing the early seventeenth-century of what today is called Paraguay and the states of Pará and Maranhão in Brazil. In dialogue with the abundant historiography about mission history, my own critical position leans closer to a more secular and critical stance. In a reticent spirit, it is always crucial to interrogate the essentially social construction of utopianism (or ideal polity) within and against the larger three-dimensional background that may welcome such construction, repudiate it or find it wanting. An alert spirit is needed since the invocation of the nominal good (say, freedom) appear to constitute a prerequisite of any commonwealth-establishing process, whether progressive or regressive (the naming of freedom being of rigor, one needs to analyze the social situation of the naming and the arrangement of the social contents whether inclusive or exclusive as regards the majority of the population). Not to take any of these namings at face value, my analysis has been mostly focusing on the Early Modern historical specificity and ductility of the term utopianism. I have found this epochal construction of the ideal commonwealth profoundly informed by the enforcement of patterns of regularity and predictability (or ordering), synchronicity and sameness (for one thing, the very homogeneous category of Indian amid unprecedented ethnic and pluri-lingual differences in an increasingly mestizo landscape). In the preceding pages, I have been looking at some of the tensions and contradictions informing the Jesuit reformist construction of a global and ideal commonwealth in the transatlantic clash of modes of production inside the largely barter economy of the Amazon region and the incipient predations of money economy and colonial state impositions regarding tax tribute and forced labor. Specifically, I have looking at the proposals by Montoyas Spiritual Conquest (1639) and two selections among the 1654 letters to the Portuguese King, João lV by Antonio Vieira. Inside the massive scholarly field of mission literature, I have been following David Sweets praxis, included in Langer and Jacksons edition. Following Weber, I have adopted a frontier exchange paradigm in trying to deal both with the precariousness of imperial borders, massive slave raids and the structural plasticities of colonial establishment of conditions of imposition regarding tax tribute and force labor.

I have been asking questions to the traditional assertion that a bit too easily equated Jesuit missions and utopianism in the strict sense of mirific Christian commonwealth (sementeras) in the middle of a wild and desolate landscape (soledades). This is no longer satisfactory, if ever. My tentative diagnosis: Jesuit reformist structuring of mission enclaves largely operate in the manner of a cog in the imperial wheel as one crucial frontier institution granted by higher instances of political power and also internally granting exceptional privileges concerning tax and labor impositions to those most fragile social sectors which we might call subaltern. Such transatlantic access to social situations of economic and legal(istic) exemptions surely comes from a privileged social positioning in the first place (the very constitution of subalternity disavows the articulation of effective rules and regulations regarding the structuring of the global commonwealth). Since Montoyas and Vieiras proposals for the best possible society are generated inside the elite group of the Society of Jesus, it appears very reasonable to equate their political desire among the most successful candidates competing for the monopoly of the human wealth in the Amazon region. We might call this wealth ethnic labor or Indian labor for heuristic purposes, but only uncomfortably so. We have seen a truly striking similiarity of enunciation and denunciation of social conflict and social solution in these two Jesuit viewpoints from two fluctuating sides of imperial formation overseas. We have also seen several striking similarities in relation to their contemporary European counterparts in the utopian tradition. On this side of the Atlantic, Jesuit proposals bring utopianism down to political praxis that fundamentally aim at the incorporation of the foreign bodies of the Indians into regulated state property against massive slave-raider predations of and solid encomendero interests. Differences among savage encomenderos and measured Jesuits are clear, structural differences among measured and reasonable encomenderos and Jesuits appear to be less clear. Jesuit political proposals fundamentally strive for greater control measures upon bodies, goods, traffic and duties. And they try to do so by following a model that we might almost want to call the United Nations politics of neutrality and legality-bound intervention into chaotic and brutal situations of International conflict. Indian labor becomes the cornerstone that, if properly kept under control, would help the overseas construction of the absolutist state (todos são interessados nos índios as Vieira says). Following the rules of orthodox political propriety and decorum, Jesuit proposals were made in the correct use of the prestigious vehicle of communication, writing in the imperial languages of Portuguese and Spanish. Their proposals make the primordial claim of attending to state interest and Crown desire (the untouchable taboo of the serviço real, serviço de V. M. as in Vieira). Due to this scrupulous observance, Montoyas and Vieiras proposals for social change (the Jesuit utopia) were welcome inside decision-making power circles and monopoly was granted until official expulsion (1759 from Portuguese America, 1767 from Spanish America). It would certainly enrich this research to be able to demonstrate Jesuit collaboration among Spanish and Portuguese lines over demarcation lines and imperial interests. After all, there is only one Society of Jesus heavily centralized and unambiguously hierarchical, largely influential, yet receding, until today. After all, the shifting imperial borderline overseas has been my rhetorical figure in this paper accentuating social unpredictability during the six decades (1580-1640) in which the Crowns of Portugal and Castile were joined 21. One Empire united at the theoretical pinnacle of the Monarch, and largely ineffective overseas as Montoya and Vieira intimate, does not at all preclude competing interests and at times unpredictable negotiations and infighting among all social sectors radically in the making. I have been trying to understand the colonial condition through the transatlantic clash of modes of production that brought money economy, cultures of land possession and sedentary settlement, alphabetic writing, civilizing (or globalizing) mindset in a tight knot with barter and itinerant economies, indigenous languages, autochthonous religious practices and intense miscenegation giving new generations to structural (or systemic) conditions of imposition for the majority of the population in the immense Amazon region.

The dual aspect of the word mission, enclave and incursion or foray, is here crucial because it highlights the fundamental itinerant nature of population migration and the precarious nature of population settlement in the initial years of empire establishment in the Amazon region. Surely, the vastness of the topic necessitates of further in-depth research. And yet, the strong suggestion as regards both accounts, Montoyas and Vierias, remains that a state of severe unregulation

--or dysfunctional colonialism-- is most likely not for the benefit of the weakest social sectors (surely, always a relational and gradual social category). At the same time, functional colonialism is not the solution either and this is perhaps the historical horizon that the Early Modern period could not transcend and I am including here all utopian authors included in the preceding pages.

In specific relation to the Amazon region, some of the colonial abuses implicit in the amphibiological structuring of tribute and labor and descriptions of some of the complexities of Indian labor on the wheels of historical motion (yanaconaje, mita, wage labor, etc.) have been developed. Like always, freedom is up for grabs in the inevitable daily construction by coexisting social agents. Vieiras and Montoyas political suggestions are proposing fund-raising appeals and well-meaning intentions and, surely among other things, are clearly after a monopoly inside the largest continental cartography of colonial Latin America. Coming from an International elite social platform of political privilege in the Early Modern period, a suspension of easy celebrations of the social experiments called the Jesuit utopia (1609-1768) must be in place until further research provides us with new data. Yet, celebrations do not come easy in relation to the larger imaginary landscape of Early Modern and colonial Latin America. Southeys words may be accurate after all about the despotic nature of this welfare system.

Finally, this is the desire behind these pages: the interrogation and hopefully with it, the abolition of structural practices of conditions of imposition, social degradation and destruction 22. If utopianism is the social good (that which is not yet here, not yet there in the past), I am not saying, there is no need to say, that the Indians, as subaltern classes, are or did the good by contradistinction to Jesuit perhaps well-meaning regulation inside the larger desolation of colonialism. More important I would suggest, is to highlight that it was the majority of the population in colonial Paraguay which mostly suffered the colonial commotion and massive restructuring of modes of living in the name of the social good, be this Christianity as the ultimate horizon and social meaning for Montoya and Vieira, civilization, state Crown interest or anything else.

The making and the chaneling of wealth for the benefit of the majority of the population (commonwealth) is the mental horizon that my writing has been intimating in relation to the historical slipperiness of utopianism, still very much in the making with us today. In relation to Early Modern utopianism, which fundamentally means regulatory measures of society control in stringent world borderlines, some of the slipperiness of the term could be semanticized today as follows: 1) the primordial and radical consideration of social egalitarianism as exposed by the question, what would a non-hierarchical structuring of say, labor (or ethnic, or sex, or languaje, etc.) look like?; 2) the abolition of degrading social labelling, the abolition of practices of social degradation; 3) the abolition of toil for life (labor) and the satisfaction of communal need or equal distribution of goods to everyone according to need; and, 4) the constant negotiation of in-between states of strict and rigorous thorough regulation and total deregulation, the dysfunctionality and ideal of the legal dictum and the legal loopholes, always with an eye on the production and distribution of social goods (whatever these might be according to the avatars of historical motion). And yet, one may very well question if the social good must be of necessity thoroughly apprehended by the law, Early Modern utopianism emphatically answered yes to this, and, should the law or regulation be the ultimate horizon, one might also want to hesitate a bit to subsume payment, truly in the shadow of money, under that excess that we might shorthand as justice. It appears to me that the excessive egalitarianism-as-justice, in the sense of outside measurement, or even outside the imagination in our contemporaneity, cannot be convincingly predicated and terminated by rigid and mechanic quantification; yet some of rigor of the numeral, think of the six working hours for everyone, might just as well be a very good start in the implementation of egalitarian measures. Egalitarianism may be said to be the measuring rod of utopianism, within which tradition Early Modern utopianism enters into existence not without colonial tensions and contradictions. For the Jesuit reformist utopianism, the ideal commonwealth is an orderly commonwealth under imperial and colonial domination that calls itself Christian. These utopian practices with all its partial felicities and limitations interpellate our practices today.

The egalitarian ideal not being here yet, my framework has been the juxtaposition of this utopian desire and the praxis of the majority (labor or mode of life). In relation to the writings of Montoya and Vieira, we have seen how the fundamental social structuring of labor changes (OGormans Spanish is surely more eloquent, se está siempre dando de sí en el transcurrir de la historia), in the same way that yanaconaje, mita and encomienda labor massively reconfigured indigenous Guarani structures and were later increasingly replaced by, and fractured by, deeply asymmetrical and abusive wage labor per work-unit (peças de serviço already in Vieira). The slow introduction of market economy brought no relief to subsequent generations (as Maeders work exemplifies). Money predations remained fragmentary and partial in large sections of Latin American society as the figure of the pongo abundantly attests well into this century. It is precisely against this historical human figure that some of the fearful and facelessly egalitarian symmetry of the Early Modern utopians with its rigorous patterns of predictability and sameness and the radiant communal eating to satisfaction may be brought to memory and desire with all its tensions and contradictions.

If motion and transition inevitably give form to any single thing called social, what would utopian praxis have meant in colonial Paraguay, amid early dysfunctional Empire-establishing and reformist Jesuit manufacturing of the ideal state, if not the effective negatives of no-tribute, no-forced labor, no-encomienda, no-mita, no-yanaconaje, even perhaps no-enclosed mission labor, and the efforcement, with or without state rules, of horizontally consistent wage labor? But, more radically, does utopianism do it if it remains within the horizon of accurate money payment? Most likely not. It appears to me, but I might be wrong, that it is mainly in the critical analysis of state (i.e. structural and systemic) conditions of force and imposition and neighboring conditions of possibility, that satisfaction of communal need and a sharper perception of qualitatively new needs in new historical times may thus occur convincingly (politics of fulfilment and transfiguration in Seyla Benhabibs words). It is then in relation to previous structurings of political paradise that we might then dare ask, what would it look like for us here and now?

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