Asceticism, Martyrdom, and Indigenous Reducciones in Friar Espino's Seventeenth-century Missionary Expeditions to La Taguzgalpa, Honduras

This article examines the significance of Friar Fernando Espino’s Relación verdadera de la reducción de los indios infieles de la Provincia de la Tagusgalpa, llamados Xicaques, a firsthand account of his missionary journeys to La Taguzgalpa, published in 1674. It contextualizes this narrative within a period of heightened scrutiny of Franciscan missionary effectiveness in seventeenth-century colonial America and employs Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of “religious field” and “capital” as its analytical framework. It explains how and why Espino portrayed himself as a model missionary—committed to his evangelizing vocation—and how he used tropes of poverty, sacrifice, and obedience to acquire symbolic capital within the religious field through the performance of extreme suffering. Overall, this essay contends that Espino’s seventeenth-century text of missionary vulnerability and sanctified violence functions as a work that moralizes and justifies colonial rule while concealing its coercive foundation and hiding the unequal power dynamics that shaped the reducción of the Indigenous populations of La Taguzgalpa.