Reductions

rdf:langString Reductions

rdf:langString June 2020

rdf:langString es

rdf:langString Reductions (Spanish: reducciones, also called congregaciones; Portuguese: redução, pl. reduções) were settlements created by Spanish rulers and Roman Catholic missionaries in Spanish America and the Spanish East Indies (the Philippines). In Portuguese-speaking Latin America, such reductions were also called aldeias. The Spanish and Portuguese relocated, forcibly in many cases, indigenous inhabitants (Indians or Indios) of their colonies into urban settlements modeled on those in Spain and Portugal. The word "reduction" can be understood wrongly as meaning "to reduce." Rather, the 1611 Spanish dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias defines reducción (reduction) as "to convince, persuade, or to order." The goals of reductions were to concentrate indigenous people into settled communities and to convert the Indians to Christianity and impose European culture. The concentration of the indigenous into towns facilitated the organization and exploitation of their labor. Reductions could be either religious, established and administered by an order of the Roman Catholic church especially the Jesuits, or secular, under the control of Spanish or Portuguese governmental authorities. The best known, and most successful, of the religious reductions were those created by the Jesuits in Paraguay and neighboring areas in the 17th century. The largest and most enduring secular reductions were those imposed on the highland people of the former Inca Empire of Peru during the rule of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569–1581).