In 1691, the Jesuit missionary Jose de Arce founded the mission of San Francisco Xavier, the first link in what would become the Jesuit Missions of the Chiquitos. The mission gathered the Pinoca people, one of the many indigenous groups of this borderland between savanna and forest. The early years were precarious. Slave-raiding expeditions from Brazil, the Paulistas, drove the settlement to relocate to the San Miguel River in 1696, then again in 1698. In 1708 colonists from Santa Cruz seized many of the mission's people, forcing yet another move. That a community survived such repeated upheaval, and went on to build something lasting, says much about the resilience of the people who lived through it.

The church that crowns San Javier today is the work of Martin Schmid, a Swiss Jesuit who was at once priest, composer, and architect. Between 1749 and 1752, Schmid raised a sanctuary that married European baroque form to the materials and craftsmanship of the Chiquitania, timber columns, carved and painted surfaces, an interior of warm worked wood rather than cut stone. He brought music with him as much as architecture, training indigenous musicians and leaving behind a tradition that still echoes through these towns. The style he helped create, often called baroque-mestizo, belongs to no single continent. It is the sound and shape of two worlds meeting in the forest.

When the Spanish crown expelled the Jesuits from its American territories in 1767, the missions lost the order that had built and sustained them. The churches did not crumble overnight, but the decades that followed were lean, and the lush, humid climate of the lowlands is hard on wood and paint. For generations the great church at San Javier weathered slowly, its splendor fading. Its rescue came in the late twentieth century, when the Swiss architect Hans Roth led a sweeping restoration of the Chiquitos churches. At San Javier the work ran from 1987 to 1993, returning the building to something close to the vision Schmid had carried into the wilderness more than two centuries before.

The Pinoca dialect of Chiquitano, the language the mission's first congregation spoke, is gone now, fallen silent over the long centuries since the Jesuits arrived. Yet it did not vanish without a trace. The Camba Spanish heard in San Javier today is salted with Pinoco words, fragments of a vocabulary carried forward in everyday speech long after the language itself ceased to be spoken. It is a faint inheritance, but a real one, a reminder that the people who built and rebuilt this mission left their mark not only in carved columns but in the very words their descendants still use without always knowing where they came from.