The following selection is excerpted from the 1633 Jesuit annual letter, written by the provincial head and procurator Fr. Juan de Bueras, to the superior general. These annual letters would serve as a general report on the status and plans of the missionary province in question, and oftentimes consisted of transcriptions from letters written by other Jesuits throughout the province and addressed to the provincial head. Seen in the wider context of colonial history and Philippine culture, however, the letter also obliges us to question our basic assumptions about religious conversion and native resistance on the transpacific frontier of the Spanish empire.

Father Bueras arrived in the archipelago in 1622, along with a number of Jesuits sent from Europe via the Mexico-Acapulco galleon for the purpose of expanding the Jesuit mission. The areas of Jesuit missionary activity included the island of Mindoro, just south of Luzon where the walled city of Intramuros lay on the banks of the Manila Bay. Prior to the Jesuits’ arrival in Nauhan, the settlement had been under the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Manila for fifty years. The primary purpose of the Jesuit mission in Mindoro was to preach to the native highland group known as Mangyanes, with the ultimate goal of converting them to Christianity and persuading them to be resettled or “reduced” (reducción) or “congregated” (congregación) around the coastal, presumably Christian, settlements.