Martinez, John J., S.J. Not Counting the Cost: Jesuit Missionaries in Colonial Mexico - a Story of Struggle, Commitment. and Sacrifice. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2001. Pages, ix + 262. Cloth, $21.95. ISBN: 0829415556

Reviewed by: Ernesto Sweeney, SJ

Martinez set himself the task of producing a one volume, general readership account of the great Jesuit missionary enterprise in the Viceroyalty of New Spain from 1566 to 1767. His story of evangelization and adventure on the frontier of colonial Mexico highlights the glories and the tragedies of effort and sacrifice in service to the church and state in incorporating an enormous expanse of territory from Mexico City to the Sonora desert and Baja California. His narrative, building on the work of others, offers a panoramic view of this missionary epic. The book is based on a broad array of published primary and secondary sources including much Jesuit documentation along with civil and military records. This account does not match the brilliant scholarship and analysis of works such as Felix Zubillaga’s eight-volume Monumenta Mexicana (1956-1991), Peter Masten Dunne’s Pioneer Jesuits in Northern Mexico (1944), or the extensive writings of Charles W. Polzer on Kino and his companions in more recent years. It does, however, offer a welcome overview of the Jesuit mission enterprise.

Not Counting the Cost captures the cruel realities and the exhausting efforts faced by a band of priests and brothers on the cutting edge of European global expansion. They laid the foundations of the religious culture of Christendom in today's northwestern Mexico and southwestern United States. The narrative does not romanticize, glorify, or fantasize the inescapable stark realities of work and suffering among indigenous peoples. Martinez, a Jesuit and parish priest in Virginia, is not a professional historian, but rather a dedicated, dogged writer who over the course of ten years pursued his search for data, understanding, and insight into the activities of the Jesuits in colonial Mexico. His chronologically structured narrative follows the growth and development of the enterprise from its beginning in 1566 at the request of King Philip II. Starting in 1572, Mexico City served as the base of missionary expansion both north and south. In a wide variety of works such as parishes, hospitals, and farm communities, education was from the beginning the central distinctive ministry of the Jesuits. Schools were built from Morelia to Oaxaca prior to the great push northwest into Sinaloa and Sonora. The encounter with Indian tribes from1590 to 1616 followed upon the heels of the Spanish explorers and the gold and silver seekers of Zacatecas and other areas. Martinez puts a face with names, ages, and dates on the Jesuits, and he places them in the context of their lives made up of many elements of frontier evangelization from the joys of religious celebrations to the horror of sudden, violent death of twenty-nine Jesuits in Indian raids and rebellions.

The simple geographical diagrams throughout the book provide a sense of place, distance, and terrain. Perseverance in the face of violence and hardships of every kind in isolated regions of desert wastelands and mountain escarpments made possible footholds for the missions. The Jesuits kept leapfrogging northward from river to river on the West coast of the Mexican mainland. Their thrust north from the Yaqui River to the Sonora desert went forward from 1614 to 1767 among mutually hostile and linguistically distinct tribes. The financial burdens were tremendous, and the cultural shock for young Spanish Jesuits sent to work in the Sierra Maestra can easily be imagined.