“The Garden of America”: Nature, Wonder, and Nationalism in the Creole-Jesuit Narrations of Chile

Major changes in the political and social panorama affected the eighteenth-century world. The regalist policies of the Bourbon culminated with the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from the Spanish imperial domains in 1767, and Jesuits have been forced to move to the Papal State territories of central Italy. Many of them were Creoles, with Spanish ancestry but of American birth. During the exile, the Jesuit community developed a shared cultural and political identity which emerges from their works. The role of Creole-Jesuits goes beyond their figure as religious actors. Indeed, it was fundamental for their scientific contribution to the eighteenth-century debates and the development of modern science. Also, through the reading of their works, it is possible to reconstruct a picture of the late-colonial Spanish imperial world and to rethinking nationalism – in purely anthropological terms. Following these premises and through the analysis of primary sources, I will study the intellectual works of Juan Ignacio Molina and Felipe Gómez de Vidaurre y Girón as representatives of the Creole-Jesuits from the Chilean province who spent their exile between Imola and Bologna over eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.