Neda Bezerra
Religion in New Spain is an anthology of the history of colonial religious culture. The articles in it open a window to the rich and complex society of New Spain and to the several different faces of Catholicism in the region. The works presented by Schroeder and Poole question the “stereotype put forth by some authors who labor to portray the Spanish conquest as Armageddon and the end of indigenous culture” (2007, 2). Instead, Schroeder and Poole contend that the native populations in New Spain were active in shaping colonial religion. The natives selected aspects of Catholicism that they enjoyed and best suited them. In an effort to accommodate to the demands of their conquerors, they sought to integrate those elements of Spanish religious tradition that did not disrupt their own spiritual beliefs. The Indians’ pre-contact religious systems helped them make sense of the world and deal with the uncontrollable forces of nature. They called on a pantheon of deities to order the cosmos on their behalf. Thus, when the Spaniards introduced them to Catholic traditions of divine assistance, such as the cult of the saints, for instance, they were able to understand and accept them.
Even though the Indians embraced some aspects of Christianity, they remained ambivalent in regard to others. Kevin Terraciano, in an article published in Religion in New Spain (2007), writes about the natives’ responses to Catholicism in early colonial Oaxaca, and argues that “accepting a new deity did not entail rejecting all others, nor did the continuation of ancient practices and beliefs signified a rejection of Christianity” (2007, 22). When the Spaniards noticed ambivalence, they would sometimes persecute the natives, who in turn “tried to appease zealous Spaniards by reassuring them that they accepted Christianity” (Terraciano 2007, 23). The Indians would argue that they had given up their idols when they were baptized and at times they would even offer gifts to the Spaniards as a sign that they were good Christians. When pressed to hand in their sacred images, the natives would give their least favorite and tried to keep their most precious ones (Terraciano 2007). The repression imposed by the Spaniards fueled clandestine practices in the early colonial period, when rituals were performed in remote locations and “small, bundled images were worshiped in houses or carried to remote mountains or caves” (Terraciano 2007, 25). Terraciano’s article shows that the natives tried as much as they could to maintain their belief system despite the insurmountable pressure they faced.
The Spanish missionaries used different strategies to attract the natives to Christianity, even allowing ceremonies to be adapted, by letting the natives bring in some of their religious practice into the Catholic rituals. Lisa Sousa, in her article “Tying the Knot: Nahua Nuptials in Colonial Central Mexico”, published in Religion in New Spain (2007), explains how Spaniards sought to change the natives’ practices that they did not consider good and appropriate. They introduced the sacrament of marriage to the natives, but “when grounds for convergence and mutual understanding existed, Nahua customs, beliefs, and institutions survived, and in some cases, flourished” (Sousa 2007, 43). The missionaries allowed the Nahua practices that did not violate Christian principles to be maintained. It was within this context that “hybrid Nahua-Christian marriage rituals developed, which combined European and indigenous traditions” (Sousa 1991, 43). These adaptations of ceremonies, be it of marriage or any other, attracted the natives to church and to the sacraments, but they did not replace their rituals completely. Schroeder and Poole (2007) contend that the natives might be said to be good Christians, but not very good Catholics for they continued to find meaning in their own traditional ceremonies despite the fact that they allowed some aspects of Catholicism to fuse with their beliefs.
Gutiérrez, in his book When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846, which analyzes the impact of Spanish occupation on the Pueblos Indians, also argues that there was fusion of Catholic and native religious beliefs during the Spanish occupation. He asserts that the Franciscan friars “actively tried to fuse the Indian notion of a scared natural world with the Christian supernatural” (1991, 165). The friars came to accept a syncretic form of Catholicism that incorporated “native and Christian concepts and symbols, regardless of their disparate meanings” because they believed this fusion of beliefs would “satisfy the Indians’ psychological needs” (1991, 165). When the Pueblos, on the other hand, “saw how the friars controlled the sacred, mobilized forces, conjured rain, healed the sick, and provided the community with meat”, they had “little doubt that the missionaries resembled might Inside Chiefs” (1991, 63). It was then that some native chiefs allied themselves with the Franciscans and subordinated their pantheon of gods to the Spaniards.
There are innumerous examples of blending native and Spanish traditions and rituals during colonial time. Gutiérrez (1991) notes, for instance, that the “Franciscans fused the calendric rhythms of Pueblo ceremonialism with Christ’s life cycle” (1991, 84). He explains that Christians start to prepare for the celebration of the birth of Christ on December 16, which coincides with “the four preparatory days the Indians observed before celebrating the winter solstice” (1991, 84). During that time the friars organized a series of autos and dances, which depicted some of the stories about the nativity. For Gutiérrez, the Pueblo Indians most likely did not understand the words they heard, but they were able to understand the story’s plot by what they saw and linked it to their own mythical beliefs, such as the birth of the “Twin War Boys, the sons of Father Sun conceived miraculously when a virgin ate two pine nuts” (1991, 85). The Pueblos celebrated the winter solstice around the same time that the Spaniards celebrated Christmas; thus, the two were easily fused in the Indian mind, according to Gutiérrez (1991). Carroll (2002) supports Gutiérrez’s findings. He says that “Pueblo Indians did participate in the ‘life-cycle’ rituals of the Church and did participate in a number of church festivals throughout the year” and this might not have been entirely the result of coercion; however, they were not “’devout’ in the sense of that term: they had no serious understanding of Catholic doctrine, no strong devotion to Mary or to the saints (and certainly non to Christ)” and they placed no value in some of the Catholic rituals, such as confession and communion (Carroll 2002, 47).
Carroll (2002) reviews the history of the Penitente Brotherhood, a lay confraternity of Catholic men that emerged in New Mexico during the Spanish occupation. Several hypotheses had been put forth to explain the emergence of the Penitentes in New Mexico. Carroll rejects them all. He argues that the Penitentes were not a product of religious traditions, nor did they emerge because of the scarcity of clergy in New Mexico. Scholars have argued that there were so few clergy in northern New Mexico in the late 1700s and early 1800s that the Hispano “laymen took the lead in developing their own forms of Catholic religiosity”, which resulted in the emergence of the Penitentes. Carroll challenges all these findings and contends that “Penitente popularity was in the first instance a response to the crisis of kin-based patriarchal authority facing Hispano communities in the late 1700s” (2002, 119). For Carroll (2002), the emergence of Penitentes reflects a need for the old patriarchal authority that had been eroded by the Bourbon Reforms , which intended to rationalize Catholic practice. Carroll also asserts that the Penitentes became popular because they performed a number of community functions, and he links the performance of these functions to “the changes produced by the Bourbon Reforms in the late 1700s, to the erosion of patriarchal authority occasioned by these reforms and/or to the threat that this posed to the community / cooperative system of agriculture that was in place in northern New Mexico” (2002, 120). Carroll ends his argument by saying that the Penintentes “were the first instance of social response to a socioeconomic crisis that just happened to be dressed in a religious cloak” (2002, 121). According to Carroll, the type of “Catholicism that flourished among the Hispano population of New Mexico during the early nineteenth century” when the Penitentes emerged was different both from the popular Catholicism that developed both in Mexico and Spain and also “from the Catholicism that their own Hispano ancestors had practiced previously in New Mexico itself” (Carroll 2002, 6). In summary, the Penitentes is another hybrid form of Catholic tradition that emerged in the region.
Some scholars have viewed the presence of the Catholic Church in New Spain as a monolithic and unstoppable power. Yet, as we have seen, the Spaniards did not find such an easy terrain to tread as they initially thought. After three hundred years of Spanish presence in the region, Catholic missionaries still had not been able annihilate native religious practices. As late as the eighteenth century, the natives, both in Mexico and in the northern frontiers still practiced some of their religions traditions. They never relinquished their culture completely. Instead, as we have seen, there was an amalgamation of traditions. Yet, one can only say that Catholicism had a very strong impact on the entire region of New Spain. Almost two hundred years after the Spaniards left, the region has the world’s most visited Catholic pilgrimage site outside Rome: The Shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Looking north of the Mexican border, one will find Catholic traditions all throughout the Southeast, such as the devotions to the Crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipulas and to Santo Niño de Atocha, both found in El Santuario de Chimayó, in New Mexico, the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in the United States.
Bibliography
Carroll, Michael P. The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New México. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Few, Martha. Religion in New Spain. Edited by Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.
Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Schroeder, Susan and Stafford Poole, ed. Religion in New Spain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.
Terraciano, Kevin. Religion in New Spain. Edited by Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment