The long-run effects of missionary orders in Mexico

Abstract

This paper examines the long-run eects of dierent Catholic missionary orders in colonial Mexico on educational outcomes and Catholicism. The main missionary orders in colonial Mexico were all Catholic, but they belonged to dierent monastic traditions and adhered to dierent values. Mendicant orders were committed to poverty and sought to reduce social inequality in colonial Mexico by educating the native population. The Jesuit order, by contrast, focused educational eorts on the colony's elite in the city centers, rather than on the native population in rural mission areas. Using a newly constructed data set of the locations of 1,145 missions in colonial Mexico, I test whether long-run development outcomes dier among areas that had Mendicant missions, Jesuit missions, or no missions. Results indicate that areas with historical Mendicant missions have higher present-day literacy rates, and higher rates of educational attainment at primary, secondary and postsecondary levels than regions without a mission. Results show that the share of Catholics is higher in regions where Catholic missions of any kind were a historical present. Additional results suggest that missionaries may have aected long-term development by impacting people's access to and valuation of education. seminar participants at LSE and participants of the Advanced Graduate Workshop at the University of Manchester for very helpful feedback and suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge nancial support from Cusanuswerk.1 When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America in 1492, Catholic missionary orders accompanied them in order to convert the native population to the Christian faith. In colonial Mexico, the Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian, and Jesuit orders were the main missionary orders. All part of the Roman Catholic Church, they were similar in many respects, such as organizational structure.1 They belonged, however, to dierent monastic traditions, and obeyed dierent sets of rules. The Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian orders followed the Mendicant tradition, Church. Jesuits endorsed economic wealth and inuence as valuable means to this end. In colonial Mexico, they established a close connection [with] the criollo 2 elite[that] rested on the order's educational contributions (MacLachlan, 1980: 137).They strengthened the position of the Catholic elite in the colony, and contributed to the strong position of the Catholic Church in the country. Social inequality, they felt, was justiable because the Spanish were the instrument chosen by God to incorporate the Indies into Christian society through subjecting their inhabitants to Spanish dominion (Liss, 1973:458). This paper compares educational and cultural outcomes today in areas that had 1 All orders were answerable to the pope and their rules had to be approved by the pope.The orders were all trans-national organizations that were organized in provinces and consisted of celibate, highly educated men.2 The term criollo comprised people born in Hispanic America of European ancestry.

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“…Although Jesuits were eventually expelled from these countries, the influence of their early investments persists. Waldinger (2017) shows that literacy and educational attainment are higher in Mexico in proximate areas to Mendicant Catholic missions; proximity to colonial Jesuit missions is not systematically linked to education, though it correlates with the Catholic share.…”

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“…Localities XVI indicates the number of settlements present in a municipality in the 16th century, from a set of maps by Cook and Simpson (1948), which we digitized and geo-referenced. We also consider religious settlements, measured by the number of Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian , and Jesuit missions at the municipal level using data from Waldinger (2017).…”

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