author
Juan Patricio Fernández
1661–1733
A Jesuit missionary and chronicler of colonial South America, he is best known for a detailed early-18th-century account of the Chiquitos missions connected with the Jesuit Province of Paraguay. His writing helped preserve a European record of those communities and their history.
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About the author
Born in Spain in 1661, Juan Patricio Fernández was a Jesuit priest, missionary, and writer. Library and bibliographic records identify him with the Society of Jesus and connect him with Loranca de Tajuña as his birthplace and Corrientes as his place of death.
He is chiefly remembered for Relación historial de las misiones de indios chiquitos que en el Paraguay tienen los padres de la Compañía de Jesús, published in Madrid in 1726. The work describes the Jesuit missions among the Chiquitos and was important enough to be translated into other languages, including Latin.
Fernández died in 1733. Although biographical details about his life are limited in the sources I could confirm, his surviving work gives him a clear place among early writers who documented missionary life and Indigenous communities in the Spanish colonial world.