Jesuit Missionaries Building a Global Network. Eighteenth-Century Exploration of the World in the Name of God – A Story of Disjointed Memory Jesuit Missionaries Building a Global Network

Globalization can be impressively illustrated through a critical examination of the Jesuits as they existed until the late eighteenth century.1 I want to describe a particular aspect of the early history of the region today identifi ed as Northern Mexico and Southern Arizona, commonly called ‘Sonora,’ before I turn my attention to a discussion of a publication refl ecting the universal outreach by the Jesuits. From a European perspective, that territory in northern Mexico was as far away and outside of the cultural center of the western world as possible, at least for that time. Sonora was a fairly barren land; it could not pride itself on a signifi cant cultural history, and it was not yet recognized as an important source of minerals and ores. Europeans shied away from that part of the world for many good reasons, but Sonora was populated, after all, by numerous different native tribes. These became the target of intensive Jesuit missionary activities beginning in the late seventeenth century particularly after the fi rst missionary, Eusebio Kino (1645-1711), arrived in 1687.2