Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Synoptic Methods and Practices 0826359221, 9780826359223

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Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America

R eligions of the Americas Series Davíd Carrasco, Lindsay Jones, and Charles Long, Series Editors

This series—which focuses attention on passages, rims, and borders—is dedicated to a study of the religions of the Americas since the commencement of the Atlantic world with the voyages of Columbus and the Great Encuentro that followed. The Americas, from this perspective, constitute multiple “contact zones”—that is, places where disparate cultures confront, clash, and exchange meanings, goods, and services. The series is devoted to understanding the dynamic histories, religious practices, and cultural patterns generated by these contact zones throughout North America, Mesoamerica, and South America.

Also available in the Religions of the Americas Series: Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism by Tracey E. Hucks Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico: Three Texts in Context by William Taylor Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma by William Taylor Strange Jeremiahs: Civil Religion and the Literary Imaginations of Jonathan Edwards, Herman Melville, and W. E. B. Du Bois by Carole Stewart Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State by Jennifer Reid Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba by Jualynne E. Dodson

Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America Synoptic Methods and Practices

Edited by

Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-García

Foreword by

Davíd Carrasco

University of New Mexico Press 

Albuquerque

© 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 6 ISBN 978-0-8263-5922-3 (printed case) ISBN 978-0-8263-5923-0 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress. Cover illustration: background courtesy of Pixabay licensed under CC0 1.0; handwriting, Joseph Vidal to Maria de Guadalupe de Lancastre y Cardenas, Mexico, Box 1, Folder 1, Mariana Islands letters, MS.2004.068, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

For William B. Taylor

I think of historical study as a restless kind of discipline of context. It is not just mastery of assorted facts; it is the attempt to study past human experience in all of its paradoxes, uncertainties, and silences. It is never done. As historical geographer Donald Meinig said, history “is not the study of any particular kind of thing but a particular way of studying almost anything”; reckoning with “how all kinds of things exist [and change] together” in place and time. The effort at comprehension usually is more synoptic than deductive, holding in mind quite different possibilities and trying to understand how they might coexist. Of course, no one can know enough to master it all, but in pushing Sisyphus’s rock and accepting an aching sense of ignorance, sound choices can be made about which contexts are salient in a particular episode. —William B. Taylor Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma

Contents

Foreword xiii Davíd Carrasco Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-García

Part 1. Conceiving Questions Chapter 1 Asking Questions in the Restless Discipline of Context 13 Karen Melvin Chapter 2 Double Vision Dichotomies in the Study of Latin America 29 Paul Ramírez Chapter 3 Making Sense of Geographies Regionalism in the Study of Latin American History 47 Nicole von Germeten Chapter 4 Moving across Disciplines Context, Theory, and Colonial Sources 63 Ivonne del Valle

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Part 2. Conversing with Sources Chapter 5 Quiet Voices and Laconic Sources A Synoptic Approach to Wills 81 Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara Chapter 6 Researching beyond Institutional Documents The Power of Suggestion 97 Rachel Moore Chapter 7 What’s in an Object Plato, Aristotle, and the Virgin of Copacabana 109 Sean f. McEnroe Chapter 8 Thinking at the Margins Subalterns and the Spanish American Past Kristin Huffine

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Part 3. Envisioning Histories Chapter 9 Telling Stories of Continuity and Change 137 José Refugio de la Torre Curiel Chapter 10 Foregrounding Marginal Voices Writing Women’s Stories Using Solicitation Trials 155 Jessica Delgado Chapter 11 Writing Style and Audience 169 Sylvia Sellers-García

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Part 4. Reckoning and Re-reckoning: Same Source, Different Perspectives Chapter 12 Confession and the Art of Reading 185 Matthew D. O’Hara Chapter 13 Solicitation Stories Reading Confession between History and Literature 195 Seth Kimmel Chapter 14 Ritual, Intimacy, and Emotion in Sacramental Spaces Jennifer Scheper Hughes Chapter 15 A Confusion of Tongues or the Want of Schooling A Carmelite Vision of Humble Penitents 207 Sean f. McEnroe Chapter 16 Mendacious Texts The Art of Confessional Dissimulation 217 Paul Ramírez Chapter 17 Advice and Warnings for New Confessors by a Discalced Carmelite Friar and Priest 225 Translated by Karen Melvin, Paul Ramírez, and Sylvia Sellers-García Afterword 257 Kenneth Mills Contributors Index

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Foreword

With the publication of Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Synoptic Methods and Practices, skillfully edited by Karen Melvin and Sylvia SellersGarcía, our Religions of the Americas Series takes a new turn in historical research and writing. All previous books in the series were by individual authors, whereas this volume presents fifteen scholars who embrace, wrestle with, and alter the eclectic field of historical writing in order to invite the reader into a new kind of learning experience about colonial Latin America. Overall the volume takes its cue from historian and teacher William B. Taylor’s conception of “historical study as a restless kind of discipline of context. It is not just mastery of assorted facts; it is the attempt to study past human experience in all of its paradoxes, uncertainties, and silences. It is never done.” Capitalizing on Taylor’s both cautionary and liberating contention that “the effort at comprehension usually is more synoptic than deductive, holding in mind quite different possibilities and trying to understand how they might coexist,” the contributors address such topics as confession, women’s stories, trials, wills, virgins, penitents, ritual intimacy, geography, and dichotomies as well as models for historical reconstruction, the role of imagination, and the power of questions that deliberately avoid simple and direct conclusions in favor of what the editors term “multiple answers, unanswered questions, or loose threads.” Combining a rigorous attention to the sources—in some cases examining a single source from deliberately different perspectives—with an unwillingness

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to settle for pat interpretations or reconstructions, these essays exemplify the Religions of the Americas Series’s focus on passages, rims, and borders and on the colonial-era Americas as a patchwork of “contact zones” where disparate cultures confront, clash, and exchange meanings, goods, and services. What is also new in this publication is the intellectual vigor these authors employed in responding to Inga Clendinnen’s lamentation about modeling historical writing for the next generation: “For students, people wanting to write history, they get very few examples of how to do it.” Readers of this book will, in fact, find some novel and persuasive models of how to write history in more synoptic ways, or they may find, as one contributor writes, that “remaining open to their surprises anew proved more satisfying, more human, than having pretended to be right.” Davíd Carrasco, for the Series Editors

Acknowledgments

We thank the editors of the Religions of the Americas Series—Davíd Carrasco, Lindsay Jones, and Charles Long—for including this volume on methodology in their series. We are particularly grateful for Davíd’s enthusiasm and support from the beginning of this project to the very end. Our thanks to the very capable staff of the University of New Mexico Press, especially John Byram, Beth Hadas, Judith Antonelli, Lila Sanchez, and James Ayers, for shaping the manuscript into a book. Thanks to Katherine Fox, Shelley Barber, and Andrew Isidoro at the Burns Library and to Ken Ward at the John Carter Brown Library for their rapid assistance with our cover image. We are indebted to Bates College and Boston College for their institutional support. The comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers have made this a better book—thank you. We gratefully acknowledge Ken Mills for reading and recommending improvements for many of the chapters, for his timely advice, and for his great generosity. This volume is the product of collegiality. Our contributors brought to life the idea of teaching synoptic methodologies and did so with remarkable patience and goodwill. We look forward to celebrating the book’s completion with all of you. Finally, we wish to thank William B. Taylor, to whom this volume is dedicated, for his continuing mentorship and friendship. This book is about teaching, and it reflects our appreciation of how he has always placed this undertaking at the center of our profession. xvii

Introduction Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-García

Good histories are not in short supply. There are old favorites and new eyeopeners, the ones to savor slowly and the ones to envy outright. When we, the editors of this volume, first discussed how to frame this collection of essays, we talked about all the impressive works we wanted to emulate—the models we’ve looked up to in our own research and writing. As much as we admire them, all these impressive works have a common problem: they don’t tell us how they were made. In some cases, deliberately obscuring the painstaking work of scaffolding, building, and patching is the whole point: the written work is wonderful because it presents itself as effortless. As historian Inga Clendinnen has said, “For students, people wanting to write history, they get very few examples of how to do it. You tend to get a performance, a polished performance where the ropes and . . . the safety net and everything else are made as invisible as possible.” 1

High-Wire History The ropes and the safety net and everything else: What are they? What do they consist of? Mostly, we think, they are choices: how to frame a question; which archives to visit or primary sources to use; which secondary sources to read; how to define a term; style and audience, word choice and emphasis; which ideas matter; whether to make a comparison or stick to a single case; whether to read another fifty documents or focus closely on the

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one at hand; whether to write as an activist or a scholar or both; whether to include personal experiences. Behind the work are hundreds of choices that we, the perhaps lucky readers, do not see. Even when it is not the author’s principal intention to make these choices invisible, written history tends to obscure its own process as a matter of course. The whole point is to give the reader something that looks like a result. How, then, are we supposed to imitate the works we most admire? Or, for that matter, how are we supposed to avoid making the mistakes committed by the works we don’t admire? How are we supposed to do our own highwire act if we can’t see how others do it? Typically, we read between the lines, we scrutinize footnotes, and we do a lot of guessing about the choices others have made. We make observations about the archives visited, the secondary sources consulted, the theories pondered, and the emphases made. For every choice we’re able to figure out, there may be dozens that we can’t. The essays here are different. They attempt to show the ropes, the safety net, and (some, if not all, of) the rest. The authors of these essays are clear about their choices, which are laid bare for examination. This requires a certain amount of courage: exposure invites scrutiny, which invites criticism. (Tucking away the knots and frayed edges of one’s process not only heightens readability, it also allows for a bit of complimentary mystification!) As we see it, this invitation to scrutiny and criticism is part of the purpose. It’s a different kind of high-wire act to show the whole rickety structure in the background—the worn ropes, the holes in the net, the duct tape on the poles, and the sweat on the bar—and it invites you, the readers, into a different kind of learning process. What we’re trying to do with these essays is approach method from a different perspective. Methodology is usually taught in some form at some point in a student’s training, and is it most often taught as a survey of past methods, an introduction to a tool kit, or some combination of the two. The survey and tool kit strategies are valuable in their own ways. But this volume suggests an alternate approach that both complements and complicates these more conventional strategies. It asks you to do four related things. First, this volume will ask you to interrogate your influences. We’re all familiar with the idea that “you are what you read,” and the maxim is no less true for scholars. Reading theoretical works immersively will shape

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certain approaches. Reading across several disciplines or reading exclusively within a discipline will shape others. You are also much more than what you read. As Jack Hexter has written in his elaboration of “the second record,” we bring many things to scholarly work, to that “first record” of primary sources.2 We bring all that we have read; but we also bring personal experiences, cultural backgrounds, gendered conceptions, generational mindsets, and every manner of idiosyncrasy. Acknowledging this second record and how it influences our work is part of being a thoughtful and self-aware scholar, and the learning here often begins vividly and early. In discussions of what is sometimes too easily dismissed as bias, we begin to think about the way our individual pasts shape our interpretations of the historical record. The acknowledgment of our genealogies as readers receives, comparatively, less emphasis. We are often identified by labels that describe our practices imperfectly, and thus we barely scrutinize our intellectual pasts: a literature major, a cultural historian, an early modernist, or a Latin Americanist. Moreover, the practices and pasts themselves are not always the focus of sustained examination. How did we learn to think like historians, literary scholars, or theologians? What works shaped us most? What ideas determined the route we would take? How much are we even aware of the methods that we have absorbed through years of dutiful reading? A starting assumption of this volume is that examining our own genealogies and considering our methods deliberately will result in better work. Second, this volume will ask you to reconsider how source and method meet. We are working in an eclectic field, one that has taken many turns and, at the start of the twenty-first century, has found itself with many kinds of history: social history, cultural history, narrative history, political history, the history of ideas, the history of objects, and the history of worlds (e.g., religious, Atlantic, archival). These can be useful starting points and useful ways of framing topics. They can also prescribe a method, suggesting a particular approach to sources: to apply a certain perspective, focus, or technique to the material. The approach presented here, in contrast, asks the source to suggest its methods. This determinedly source-based view argues that the best approach to a source is to arrive with many alternatives, to listen to what the source has to say, and to learn from it. The source might suggest multiple methods. It might suggest a method no one has ever used before. Or it might

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reaffirm the use of a familiar method. Regardless, letting the source suggest its methods requires a particular kind of reading, observing, and interpreting. Third, this volume will ask you to rethink the nature of investigative answers. Methods are often geared toward yielding a clear answer, a consistent interpretation, or a firm conclusion. The approach proposed here, in contrast, suggests that the more revealing result might take the form of multiple answers, unanswered questions, or loose threads. As William Taylor wrote in his introductory comments to Shrines and Miraculous Images, comprehension of a certain kind is “more synoptic than deductive, holding in mind quite different possibilities and trying to understand how they might coexist.” 3 This approach can seem somewhat daunting. The results are sometimes messy, and in everything from high school essays to scholarly articles we are urged by the people reading our work to be decisive in argument and conclusion. It might seem pointless to immerse oneself in sources and emerge on the other end with more questions than answers. The first counterargument is that sometimes loose threads and unanswered questions are the more accurate interpretation. Before you squint skeptically at the word accurate, consider the purpose of accuracy—not what it does or doesn’t consist of, but what it is meant to accomplish. Is trying to be accurate primarily about adding to the amorphous thing that we think of as knowledge? Is it primarily about proving something to other scholars? Maybe it is neither. During a recent conversation with a group of students, a vexing question of the big and unanswerable kind floated to the middle of the table: What is our obligation, as historians, to the people we write about? This is a difficult question, no less so when the people we write about are long gone and far away. Despite the considerable body of persuasive work that treats historical analysis as constructed, verging on fictive, and truthful only in the most illusory sense, the obligation to people of the past is most powerfully felt as an impulse to accuracy. As Inga Clendinnen has noted, “Historians take the large liberty of speaking for the dead, but we take this liberty under the rule of the discipline, and the rule is strict.”4 This is not to deny that invention happens or even to deny that it is essential to the historian’s work. Scholars of all stripes agree that much of what we consider the “first record,” in Hexter’s terms, would be meaningless without the kind of interpretation that makes use of imagination. But it is an exact imagination. “A

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historical narrative is a construction,” Arlette Farge has written, “not a truthful discourse that can be verified on all of its points. This narrative must combine scholarship with arguments that can introduce the criteria of truthfulness and plausibility.” 5 The arguments thus introduce their own criteria. And too often a tidy answer or argument, a neat knotting of loose threads, would defy plausibility. Multiple answers and loose threads are, in some cases, the best way to be accountable to past lives. The second counterargument is that multiple answers, unanswered questions, and loose threads do something valuable in their own right. They change the conversation of scholarship. Instead of contributing to a spinning wheel of revisionism in which decisive conclusions are asserted, rebutted, and overthrown in favor of new decisive conclusions, this approach openly welcomes other readers into the work. The multiple answers, unanswered questions, and loose threads are invitations to engage and interpret. Fourth, this volume will urge you to embark on a sustained study of methodology not once, but always. If sources suggest their own methods and research often yields multiple answers, then thinking about methodology once a semester or once a year is not going to be enough. Deciding on a certain method and applying it wherever one finds documents might be efficient, but it does not respond seriously to the material at hand. This volume advocates sustained thinking about methodology alongside the work of interpreting and writing. It advocates approaching history as, in E. P. Thompson’s famous phrase, a “restless . . . discipline of context.” Different sources and different questions require different methods, and writing the best history we can requires a restless search for the best methods.

Synoptic History The essays in this collection offer approaches that might best be labeled synoptic. A synoptic approach seeks to understand the past not as a collection of facts but as a combined whole. The names, dates, and places of history are, by themselves, dead information. It is only when we seek connections among them—their significance for the ongoing experiences of individuals, groups, and states—that we give them life and meaning.6 The search for this meaning

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is a search for, in Louis Mink’s phrase, “total context.” 7 The synoptic approach argues that there is not one method for studying the past and that indeed the best practice is to rely on several methods, casting and recasting into the pooled resources of our collective fields to generate new perspectives and practices. These essays therefore aggregate more than they dissect and do not limit themselves to a particular type of subject, source, or methodology. They are not organized into chapters around different historical subjects (e.g., Indians in colonial Mexico), types of sources (e.g., Inquisition cases), or standard methodologies (e.g., philology). Instead they are separated into four sections that loosely follow the research and writing process: they consider what questions we can ask, what sources can tell us, what stories we can tell readers, and what multiple forms those stories might take. Part 1 focuses on different ways of approaching research topics and the sorts of questions we might ask. It is a truism to say that good questions need to contain a “so what” element, but formulating an insightful and compelling question can require as much research as finding an answer does. How does our object of study fit into or complicate larger narratives? In what ways does place or geography matter to the story? How do we make sense of people or events without shoehorning them into oversimplified categories? How can sister disciplines (besides history) offer guidance or new perspectives? This section emphasizes that although historical research need not begin with a clearly delineated hypothesis in the social scientific mold, the questions we develop do shape the way we approach documents, problems, and interpretations. In chapter 1 Karen Melvin addresses the doubts that plague every researcher confronting a new source: What kinds of questions should one ask of a source? Are there right and wrong questions? In her response Melvin suggests “an approach grounded in an attentive search for connections between the evidence and the circumstances, societies, and cultures that produced it—in other words, finding the contexts that can best make sense of it.” Finding context can be a “restless” process—it requires work that is “open-ended” and creative. It is particular to each source and demands an energetic imagination. Offering specific types of questions, Melvin gives the reader a flexible approach to almost any kind or combination of sources. In chapter 2 Paul Ramírez tackles the enduring tendency to think of colonial Latin America in twos—a tendency that results in a kind of “double

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vision.” Dichotomies shape many of the questions we have asked as scholars about the past; should this continue to be so? Examining the potential of several dichotomies, Ramírez advocates “owning up” to how binaries are integral to the mindset of many of our colonial subjects. But he also reminds us that “dichotomies are produced contingently” and that where there are changes we should “linger longer on the intermediaries, great and small, in each of our places and times of study.” In chapter 3 Nicole von Germeten considers the importance of geography and regional differences in framing questions. Geography, in her view, consists of physical place as well as the particular characteristics of that place, including its society, economy, demographics, institutions, and sacred geography. She proposes that different aspects of geography matter to different projects and that “every research project requires its own questions relating to how location affects historical actors and what records can shape new scholarship.” In chapter 4 Ivonne del Valle suggests how questions can be shaped by bringing multiple disciplines to bear. In particular she draws on personal experience and uses a hybrid approach that incorporates theory and close reading. Theory offers a framework that can help us see larger trends, and close reading helps us see words as social constructs and therefore the logic behind the creation of a text. She proposes that these tools can point beyond the “way things were” to reveal gaps between text and intention and to suggest how meaning is construed differently in different periods. Part 2 turns to sources and different ways of coming to grips with them and their possible meanings. The synoptic approach suggested here is grounded in broad, detailed, and thorough contextualization—the “restless . . . discipline of context.” Sometimes it might require finding good contexts for certain types of sources. How do we work with sources that seem to say less than we hoped? Or how do we contextualize sources like physical objects that contain no words at all? Other instances might require us to shift our perspectives on how we use our sources. How can putting different types of documents in conversation shed light on otherwise inaccessible topics? Chapter 5, by Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara, introduces this idea, showing how context illuminates and indeed allows meaningful source interpretation. Scrutinizing the will of an eighteenth-century Guatemalan woman,

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Leavitt-Alcántara reveals how “laconic” documents can be made to talk, if each spare word is understood to point to social, cultural, and economic structures beyond the document. Chapter 6, by Rachel Moore, discusses documents that prove especially challenging because they do not emerge from clear institutional histories: what Moore calls “diffuse documentation.” Drawing on her own research path as an example, she demonstrates how to think beyond institutions, reaching into diverse document fields to reckon with topics and ideas that cannot be neatly contained by institutional structures. Objects and images that defy the usual textual interpretation are just as embedded in historical contexts—and point to them just as clearly. Sean McEnroe opens chapter 7 with a reminder that material objects can offer insights into both their makers and their historical interpreters. Focusing on Our Lady of Copacabana, the patron saint of Bolivia, McEnroe reconstructs the perspective of an early biographer and critic. Unfolding the critic’s intellectual world reveals how material culture has a genealogy of meaning. In chapter 8 Kristin Huffine addresses the perennial question of how to write about people who produced few sources themselves. She argues that reconstructing the worlds of colonial subalterns requires careful attention to “the mediated and transitional nature of colonial subject formation in Spanish America.” Part 3 considers how we transform our questions and our sustained engagement with sources into interpretive histories. Interpretation occurs at every stage, of course, but as documentary material accumulates we begin to shape narratives, analysis, and histories—often before writing a single word. This section examines the choices we make as the process of shaping takes place, including the role of change over time, storytelling, and audience. How should we reckon with change over time and its partner, continuity, when we structure our writing? How do we tell potent stories while remaining true to our evidence? Who do we imagine will read our histories, and what are the best ways of communicating with them? Chapter 9, by José Refugio de la Torre Curriel, asks whether we should continue to shape historical narratives around continuity and change. He concludes that while these should be considered, they should not be the sole

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focus. “Instead of merely asking what is old and new in any given context,” he argues, “our goal should be to offer partial reconstructions of what the process of making sense of old and new realities might have been for individuals and societies: how they coped with attempts to challenge their social order and what elements they used when finding their ways through this process.” In chapter 10 Jessica Delgado employs Inga Clendinnen’s notion of “exact imagining” to interpret solicitation cases from colonial Mexico. Delgado demonstrates how to craft stories—historical narratives—by asking careful questions, contextualizing sources, and writing with attention to how marginal actors can be protagonists. She concludes that “making creative literary choices” is also essential to foregrounding these voices. In chapter 11 Sylvia Sellers-García suggests that the writing methods we practice as scholars should be self-conscious and fluid and should aim to reach many audiences. Offering specific suggestions for how to develop different styles, she argues that scholars can only benefit from writing (and reading) widely. Part 4, the final section, demonstrates that the histories we write depend as much on the questions we ask and the approaches we employ as on the sources themselves. To illustrate how the same source in different hands can tell very different tales, four scholars apply their particular interpretative choices to a chatty and frank eighteenth-century handbook for new confessors. Matthew O’Hara provides context and interpretation in chapter 12, then Seth Kimmel (chapter 13), Jennifer Scheper Hughes (chapter 14), Sean McEnroe (chapter 15), and Paul Ramírez (chapter 16) offer, in the words of O’Hara, “a chance to listen in on the conversations that emerge between researchers and their sources.” A translation of the original document in chapter 17 offers the opportunity to draw additional interpretations. This book does not map out a narrow route through the field of colonial Latin America, with clear stopping points and comfortable lodgings at the end. Rather, it offers multiple paths that are sometimes winding, adventurous, and uncertain but, we hope, always rewarding. Each path here is an opportunity. With an awareness that many other routes remain to be explored, we invite you to discover your trail and enjoy the journey.

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Notes 1. Robin Hughes, “Inga Clendinnen: Full Interview Transcript,” November 10, 2000, tape 11, Australian Biography, http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/ subjects/clendinnen/intertext11.html. 2. Jack H. Hexter, The History Primer [by] J. H. Hexter (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 82. 3. William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 2. 4. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 182. 5. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 95. 6. William B. Taylor, unpublished lecture notes, University of California, Berkeley, History 8A, lecture 1. 7. Louis O. Mink, “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding,” History and Theory 5, no. 1 (1966): 40. This in contradistinction to how synoptic is often used in religious studies. Our usage in this volume will follow Mink’s.

Part 1 Conceiving Questions

Chapter 1

Asking Questions in the Restless Discipline of Context



Karen Melvin

I was scouting for a topic for my first research seminar in graduate school when I was offered a piece of advice: start with a rich primary source. My first thought was an intriguing reference I’d seen to a document about a group of young friars who ran away from their Mexico City friary and took refuge in other friaries.1 The leader of the friars’ province immediately asked New Spain’s most powerful royal official, Viceroy Félix Berenguer de Marquina, for help returning the friars. The lengthy legal proceedings that followed included statements from the fugitives, who claimed they left because they lacked food and clothing and because the leaders of their order unfairly punished them with imprisonment, stocks, shackles, and whippings. In response those leaders tried to discredit the fugitives as immature delinquents who were trying to avoid punishment for serious offenses, including drunkenness and unapproved absences from the friary. The fugitives’ flight may also have been provoked by a lawyer with close ties to the order as part of factional disputes related to upcoming elections. In the end the viceroy ordered the friars to return to their friary but entreated their superiors to treat them leniently. The only other actions he took were to order the friary’s jail inspected (it was judged to be fine) and the meddling lawyer suspended from office for two years (although his punishment was reduced on appeal). The case was a terrific read, but it left me in a quandary. Now that I had my rich primary source, what should I do with it? How was I to organize its wealth of information into a paper with a meaningful argument?

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Even though I did not fully understand it at the time, the process I used involved searching for questions and contexts that could help make sense of the case. Good historical research must be grounded in evidence, but the perspectives we bring to that evidence and the questions we ask of it are what gives it shape and transforms an accumulation of information into purposeful writing. Those questions serve as an organizational polestar, providing the direction that allows us to structure our evidence as answers to our questions. Our task as historians in search of direction is thus twofold: find evidence to work with and find guiding questions that allow us to charge that evidence with meaning. Consider the prominent place that historian Arlette Farge gives questions in her own archival research. In The Allure of the Archives she described how, amid the reams of eighteenth-century paper in a Parisian judicial archive, she chanced upon two quotidian yet remarkable objects: a small packet of seeds and a deck of playing cards. She described how the objects’ physical realness created a feeling of certainty, as if she were touching proof of what the past was really like. Yet she also recognized the deception at play. “The sun-colored seeds and the playing cards are at the same time everything and nothing,” she wrote. “Everything because they can be astonishing and defy reason. Nothing because they are just raw traces, which on their own can draw attention only to themselves. Their story takes shape only when you ask a specific type of question of them.” 2 If asking questions allows you to shape stories out of raw evidence, how do you go about formulating those questions? In this essay I suggest an approach grounded in an attentive search for connections between the evidence and the circumstances, societies, and cultures that produced it—in other words, finding the contexts that can best make sense of it. For example, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale is based on the diary of Martha Ballard, which sticks closely to Martha’s immediate world in eighteenth-century Maine: her daily activities, her family, her work as a midwife, her community, and the local weather. Many entries are terse, some exceptionally so—for instance, “May 5 1809 Snowd and very Cold. I have felt very feeble.” 3 Yet from these seemingly meager snippets Ulrich created a remarkable account of frontier life, including its social networks, family structures, gender roles, medical practices, and religious customs. She was able to do so by considering Martha’s words within broader frames of

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reference. “It is one thing to assess the historical significance of Nancy Norcross’s lingering labor, Obed Hussey’s sojourn in jail, or Zilpa and Ebenezer Hewin’s hasty marriage,” Ulrich explained. “Taken alone, such stories tell us too much and not enough, teasing us with glimpses of intimate life, repelling us with a reticence we cannot decode. Yet, read in broader context of the diary and in relation to larger themes in eighteenth-century history, they can be extraordinarily revealing.”4 This task of contextualizing evidence, whether Martha Ballard’s diary, Arlette Farge’s playing cards, or my own fleeing friars case, involves searching through many possible contexts and deciding which ones matter most or offer the most meaningful interpretations of evidence. This “restless” searching for context is, as William Taylor and Kenneth Mills have observed, creative and “open-ended work. Much of the challenge of context calls for ingenuity, adjustment, and some ‘exact imaging.’” 5 Because this imaginative process is rooted in the specifics of the evidence and the unique perspectives the researcher brings to it, it has no set formulas or step-by-step instructions. It can thus be less intuitive than the way many of us were first taught to undertake a research project. I had been instructed to begin by finding a preliminary hypothesis and then to gauge its veracity by looking for evidence that supported or contradicted it. This approach offers the benefit of efficiency—you already know what you are looking for when you read your sources—but it can trap you within the already defined confines of your hypothesis. By drawing you into a predetermined reading of your sources, it excludes some evidence before you’ve had a chance to give it serious consideration and distracts you from other possible readings of the evidence you did include. And it is precisely this sort of wide reading and serious consideration that is required to best understand evidence and its many possible contexts. Instead of organizing your evidence around a preliminary answer, I am suggesting that you center your efforts on the search for good questions. Rather than cherry-picking your sources for what you are looking for, read them with an open mind and a careful ear for what they might be telling you. Attend to their many possible meanings, search for connections, and look for what might be similar, different, or curious about those meanings and connections. From here you can begin to see potential contexts, decide which ones matter, and formulate good questions.

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What Makes a Good Question? How was it that a motley bunch of Spanish adventurers, never numbering much more than four hundred or so, was able to defeat an Amerindian military power on its home ground in the space of two years? —Inga Clendinnen “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico” Why did people blaspheme? Why did individuals from different social backgrounds risk human and divine punishment? —Javier Villa-Flores Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico Was the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe the touchstone of insurgency and emergent nationalism? Did the popularity and political significance of her image change substantially during the struggle or as a result of the struggle? —William B. Taylor Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma How much did [American] silver or the sugar and slave trades fuel (or inhibit) the rise of Europe and differentiate its regions? —John Tutino Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America Why, in short, did the people of Guayaquil [Ecuador] or Baltimore [United States] invest or not invest, try to invent or not try, work longer hours or close down the shop, insist on shoes or go without? —Camilla Townsend Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America

The best questions signal the significance of their topic and frame it in ways that indicate what is at stake beyond the scope of the immediate topic itself. Such questions are sometimes referred to as having passed the “so what” test, as in “So what? Why does this matter?” They might ask, as the above examples do, how or why things happened (Clendinnen and Villa-Flores), about

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change or continuity over time (Taylor), about cause and effect (Tutino), or how distinct things compare to one other (Townsend).6 They are the sorts of questions that can yield more than one possible answer, and frequently they not only describe but also analyze. For example, Inga Clendinnen did not stop at asking what happened in the initial encounters between Spaniards and Amerindians, nor did John Tutino stop with how much silver was produced in the Americas—challenging questions requiring hard-won knowledge to answer in and of themselves. The authors also sought out what was significant about those encounters and that silver production. These “so what” questions rarely emerge fully formed but require active and continued engagement with sources. You can begin thinking about questions as early as when you read your first source, because each source, whether primary or secondary, is capable of prompting useful questions. But there are limitations to what any one source or type of source can do. For example, a danger of relying solely on one primary source is that it can tempt you to stay within its comfortable confines and summarize its contents rather than analyze its wider meanings. Depending on one secondary source can lead you to follow well-worn paths where it is all too easy to simply agree or disagree with the source rather than seek your own lines of argument. Instead, one of the best ways to locate meaningful questions is to put multiple sources in conversation with one another. Pulling together different sources, and especially different types of sources, helps reveal the trends, contradictions, silences, and ambiguities where the most interesting questions often reside. This chapter’s next three sections suggest some of the many possible questions that you might pose at different points in this process, and they use the example of mendicant orders and the fleeing friars case to illustrate what such questions might look like. The first two sections explore potential starting points with questions that develop out of individual primary and secondary sources, and the third suggests ways to formulate questions by seeking context from multiple sources and multiple types of sources.

Primary Sources One place to look for questions is with primary sources that you find curious or intriguing. What questions might those manuscript documents, published accounts, images, material objects, or musical compositions suggest?

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When your research originates with such sources, this is sometimes referred to as an emic approach, and it is what Robert Brentano chose to do for his book A New World in a Small Place. He explained that what he wanted to do was to take his archival findings only and “observe everything, and to decide after observation what questions could be, by me, most revealingly asked. I wanted the material to form the questions. I wanted to approach the existing remains like the kind of extreme physical archaeologist who would come to a site with no questions, which he could recognize as questions, formed in his mind.” 7 Brentano’s attempt to tune out external sources of information such as secondary sources and rely solely on what he observed in his archival research represents an extreme approach, but it highlights some of the benefits of allowing primary sources to steer a course. It keeps you grounded in your evidence and focused on questions that you can address meaningfully so you don’t waste time and energy pursuing those that, however interesting they are, you just don’t have the material to answer. It also encourages originality by pushing you to think about the material on its own terms rather than through lenses already developed by other authors. In the broadest sense you are looking for questions that can help illuminate what might be significant about a particular source. What seems interesting about it? Again, this is creative work, without hard and fast guidelines. The following suggestions for formulating questions and some ways they might be applied to the friars-in-flight case are therefore meant not to prescribe a particular course of action but to open up potential ways of thinking about your sources.

Ask about the Potential Significance of Your Sources’ Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How The basic content of a source provides one possible starting point for your questions, especially when considered in light of their significance. Who or what is depicted in a source, and what seems interesting about that? What might the events portrayed in it mean? How did something work, and why might that be of consequence? Did the timing matter? Did the location? You might look in particular for things that you did not expect to find or things that you think need to be explained. For example:

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• Who were the friars who fled, and did their flight have anything to do with their status in the order? • If, as the fugitives claimed, their poor treatment had been going on for some time, why did they choose this moment to flee? For instance, did it have anything to do with the recent arrival of a new viceroy? • Why did the fugitives choose to seek refuge in these particular friaries?

Ask Questions Similar to Those in Your Sources Many sources were created in response to questions, which you too might ask or use as springboards to new questions. Some of these questions are explicit, as in court cases or investigations that ask what happened or what someone did. For example: • Why did the friars flee? • What were conditions like in the friary’s jails, and what can that tell us about ideas of order, hierarchy, and punishment? • What was the role of the lawyer who encouraged the flight, and what sort of influence did laypeople have in religious orders? In sources where such questions are less explicit, they might still be located by asking what information the source was meant to convey. For example, an inventory of a library, a medical treatise, a map, and a set of accounting records might suggest, respectively, the following: What books were available? What was believed to cause disease, and what was believed would treat it? How was a place perceived and portrayed? Where did money come from, and where did it go? And in each of these cases: What is significant about the answer?

Ask about the Production of Your Sources Because sources are born of particular circumstances, tracing those circumstances can help you locate potential questions. This approach takes your source analysis (how, why, and by whom was the source produced when and where it was?) and seeks broader meanings. That is, what does it mean that some people acted in ways that resulted in the creation of your source? Is

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there any particular significance to the timing of your source’s creation? Does it matter that it was created in a particular place? For example, the friars case raises questions about different groups’ motivations for responding to the flight as they did, including the following: • Why did friars appeal for help to people outside the order and even outside the Church? • On what grounds—law? custom? honor?—did the fugitives base their appeals, and why? • Why did royal officials respond to the friars’ appeals as they did?

Ask How Your Sources Circulated or Were Used In addition to thinking about a source’s production, you might also consider its circulation or reception. Who would have been seeing or hearing it, and how might they have responded to it? Those users could consist of one individual (e.g., a private letter), an exclusive group of people (e.g., a viceroy’s report to royal officials in Spain), or the general public (e.g., a printed devotional tract).

Secondary Sources Another way of formulating questions is through secondary sources. Sometimes labeled an etic approach, this uses themes, questions, and debates that appear in other authors’ works as inspiration for your own questions. By paying attention to what authors chose as their guiding questions and how they went about answering those questions (i.e., what methods or approaches they used), you might identify useful questions or models. On the simplest level you might borrow a question as is, but ideally you’ll find provocative ideas that you can recast into new questions or approaches. Carlos Eire’s book about purgatory in sixteenth-century Madrid serves as an example. Eire recalled “that moment when I decided to gaze upon death,” which came after reading The Hour of Our Death, Philippe Aries’s history of views of death in the Western world: “Attracted to the topic but piqued by his methodology and conclusions, I set out to survey a much smaller portion of the same terrain as Aries, with an eye toward integrating what he had

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bifurcated—that is, the attitudes of the elites and the non-elites. Once this project began to take shape, its scope and content made Aries recede into a distant horizon; nonetheless, as is the case with most sources of inspiration, that faraway speck remained a constant point of reference.” 8 Furthermore, secondary sources can introduce larger frames of references for your own project. By introducing fields of study and the discussions that have taken place about them, these works can alert you to possible contexts for your research.

What Sorts of Questions Have Authors in My Immediate Field Asked? Surveying your field allows you to get a sense of what conversations your own work might be joining. Are there unanswered or insufficiently answered questions in the field? Are there debates to which you might contribute? For example, I initially viewed my fleeing friars case from the perspective of a historiography of mendicant orders in eighteenth-century New Spain. This literature has focused on mendicant orders’ decline and internal problems, including the loss of hundreds of doctrinas (temporary Indian parishes administered by the orders), fewer friars joining the orders, and more friars petitioning Rome to set aside their vows and leave their orders.9 How significant were these changes? Were they caused by changes in Crown policies (as Nancy Farriss and David Brading have contended), by society’s increasingly secularized worldview and the growth of alternative career paths for young men (as Francisco Morales argued), or by something else?10

What Questions from Works Outside My Immediate Field Might Be Useful? Casting a wide net for sources beyond your field can reveal works with different concerns, methodologies, and perspectives that might enliven discussions in your field. Such works can offer possibilities for comparison, suggest new approaches, and open up the range of possible contexts for you to consider. You might look for works on loosely related topics, those concerned with other times or places, and those from disciplines other than history. For instance, one way to think more broadly about mendicants is with the literature on parish priests in New Spain. How were parish priests affected by royal reforms and eighteenth-century secularization, and how did this

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compare to what happened to mendicants? The number of parish priests in central Mexico was growing even as the number of mendicant friars was declining. What might account for these differences?11 Another option is to consider the scholarship on this particular order of friars, the Order of Our Lady of Mercy (also known as the Mercedarians), in other times and places. Much of what has been written about the Mercedarians in thirteenththrough seventeenth-century Spain emphasizes the order’s primary function of redeeming Christian captives from Muslim lands. How did the Mercedarians in the Americas participate in this work or attempt to mesh this Old World project with their ministries in the New World?12 Finally, anthropologists and art historians have had much to say about mendicants in New Spain, in particular raising questions about the nature of early spiritual encounters between mendicants and indigenous residents. How did mendicants try to convey to Indians—whether in sermons, plays, architecture, baptismal fonts, or church murals—the essential points of the new religion they were teaching? What role did Indians play in this process, and how might mendicants have decided to adapt their messages to be understood? When is the story about commensurability or incommensurability?13

Sources in Conversation In Italo Calvino’s novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies, the medieval travelers staying overnight at a castle found themselves mysteriously struck mute. To pass the evening they took turns telling their tales, using a deck of tarot cards. They were able to convey meaning not only through the particular cards they chose (e.g., the Fool, the Lovers, or the Wheel of Fortune) but by placing the cards in configurations that allowed the adjacent cards to provide additional meanings. This technique of telling stories through context parallels what historians do when they seek questions and direction by putting their sources in conversation with one another. Frequently this entails blending the evidence of primary sources with the perspectives of secondary sources and looking for the most interesting intersections. A challenge, of course, is figuring out which sources to use (and not use!) and in which configurations. As you work through your sources, look for patterns in your evidence.

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What are the dominant trends? Where does your evidence fit those trends and serve as a representative example of what was happening? Perhaps even more important, where doesn’t it fit? Search for paradoxes, complications, complexities, ambiguities, and the unexpected. Did you find something that seems to contradict the accepted knowledge on your topic? Was there something you didn’t expect to find? Did you discover an exception to the general rule? Was there something that didn’t have an obvious answer and needs an explanation? These sorts of gaps can be some of the best places to find questions, precisely because they are anomalous and beg for an explanation. What seems baffling or tangled often turns out to be more interesting than what is uncomplicated or straightforward. Another lesson from Calvino’s story is that the same materials placed in different contexts create multiple stories. That is, choosing to read a source in conjunction with one source rather than another can lead to very different sets of questions and, therefore, different histories. Consider the following two examples that take the Mercedarian case as their basis. The first locates its guiding questions from what seems to be a contradiction between the actions of the state officials in the Mercedarian case and what the secondary literature suggests these officials would have done. The second takes as its starting point the different attitudes toward punishment and what those might mean. During the eighteenth century Spanish royal officials sought to establish greater control over the Church, especially the mendicant orders, which possessed greater independence from the Crown than did the diocesan branch. Throughout the century waves of decrees from Spain forced the mendicant orders to reduce the number of men who could become friars (1734 and 1757), to turn over most of their doctrinas (1749 and 1753), to submit to state-sponsored inspections that were to follow a set of royal instructions (1769), to request permission before traveling or appealing to Rome (1795), and to relinquish to the state real estate used as investments (1804). Although the state projects varied their particular targets over time, the justifications frequently referred to the need to bring monastic discipline into better compliance with state ideals and to keep the orders’ expenses and financial footprints in check. For example, Luisa Zahino Peñafort shows that the final reports from the state-sponsored inspections of orders included a range of instructions to

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ensure that friars were provided with sufficient food, clothing, and other necessities so they would not seek them outside the order. In addition, these reports offered detailed financial plans designed to balance revenues with the number of friars living in each friary, thereby preventing friaries from having an unnecessary surplus of funds or becoming a financial burden. In 1775 the Mercedarian inspector offered a plan that called for closing one friary and gradually reducing the number of friars in order to be in line with revenues. He also ordered that friaries serve decent food, provide sufficient dress and necessities, and lock their doors at night to prevent unauthorized absences. In 1779 the viceroy approved his proposal.14 Compare this picture of meddling busybody Bourbon officials seeking to reform the internal workings of mendicant orders with the case of the Mercedarians in flight in 1800. The viceroy and audiencia (superior court) officials who judged this case seem comparatively unconcerned with either reforming or gaining additional control over a seemingly undisciplined order. None of the officials expressed interest in repairing living conditions in the friary or even ensuring that the friars actually lived there. They may have not taken the fugitives’ complaints seriously, seeing them largely as machinations of an overzealous attorney, but the Bourbons were masters at finding justifications for their actions, and they were being invited to intervene. Here, in the contrast between these seemingly different stories, lies a research question: Why didn’t state officials intervene more forcefully than they did? That is, if the Bourbons were looking for opportunities to intervene in ecclesiastical affairs, why was their response so tepid? Had state interest in such issues waned since the 1770s? Were the Mercedarians—smaller and less wealthy in 1800 than in 1779—no longer seen as a significant challenge to state authority? Was this a case of different interests of officials in Spain and New Spain? Different sorts of questions emerge by reading the Mercedarian case for what it might suggest about competing norms or beliefs in the order. Anthropology, especially its subdiscipline of legal anthropology, is often concerned with these sorts of issues, including shared and contested norms in the juridical process. According to anthropologist Sally Falk Moore, “Legally oriented anthropologists are likely to ask in some specific setting about power, control, and justice: who makes the rules, who can undo them, how are they

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normalized and enforced, and how are they morally justified.” 15 Legal disputes can thus be seen as conversations about what is acceptable or unacceptable “within a given normative universe.” 16 The Mercedarian case provides a range of perspectives on how and why the fugitives were punished, including the declaration of each fugitive, the fugitives’ joint petition, and the Mercedarian leadership’s statement. Each fugitive complained of the prelates’ cruelty in punishing minor offenses with what they considered excessive punishments, including stocks, shackles, long prison sentences, and shaving the cerquillo (the remaining band of hair in a tonsure). The fugitives argued that not only had the prelates disregarded the order’s constitution, they had also offended the young friars’ honor by forcing them to appear publicly in church with embarrassingly cropped tonsures. The order’s leadership argued that the punishments not only followed the constitution (unlike, they claimed, the fugitives’ petitions, which were based on “natural law”), they were actually more lenient than what the constitution allowed, given the seriousness of the fugitives’ offenses. What did these two groups of friars consider acceptable or unacceptable punishments, and why? What legal or intellectual justifications did they cite? Can their disagreements be seen as evidence of a generational gap? If so, was the gap influenced by new, more secular ideas circulating at the time?

Conclusion: Flexibility The interpretative and creative work of contextualizing and creating questions can take diverse forms and follow multiple paths. Perhaps, like Brentano, you begin by looking for patterns among your primary sources and later expand to consider how secondary sources could help you find new questions. Or perhaps, like Eire, you start with questions provided by secondary sources and then, after spending time with primary sources, find your original questions receding. Maybe you begin brainstorming questions early on as you’re reading your first source, or maybe you wait until later in the process when you have a better sense what your sources have to say. Whatever process you choose to follow, it should be ongoing, and you should be prepared to remain flexible and continue to pose new (and, ideally, improved) questions as you progress. In fact, it is not unusual to end up following a zigzag trajectory that leaves you someplace you did not originally

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plan to be and with a final product you did not initially foresee. For example, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra explains that he began How to Write the History of the New World as an investigation of eighteenth-century debates, especially between Thomas Jefferson and the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, over whether the New World was inferior to the Old World. After a year of archival research, Cañizares-Esguerra was struck by a new question: Upon what sources and authority did the participants in the debate base their arguments? He changed his question, “and a study that was initially intended to be in the history of science became a history of New World historiography.” 17 In short, as you gain new contexts for understanding your evidence, let those continually evolving contexts guide you. Then you can best choose which of the many possible credible histories is the one you want to write.

Notes 1. Proceso sobre la fuga de siete religiosos coristas y un laico del Convento de la Merced de esta Capital, MS 293, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 2. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 12. 3. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 287. 4. Ibid., 25. 5. Kenneth Mills and William B. Taylor, Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1998), xvi. 6. Inga Clendinnen, “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico” Representations 33 (Winter 1991), 65; Javier Villa-Flores, Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006), 6; William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 140; John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2; Camilla Townsend, Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America—Guayaquil, Ecuador, and Baltimore, Maryland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 14. 7. Robert Brentano, A New World in a Small Place: Church and Religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188–1378 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 5. 8. Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-

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Century Spain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4–5. 9. Doctrinas were first instituted as part of sixteenth-century evangelization efforts. They were meant to be turned over to the diocesan clergy once the members were sufficiently Christianized. 10. Nancy M. Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759–1821: The Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege (London: Athlone Press, 1968); David A. Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Francisco Morales, “Mexican Society and the Franciscan Order in a Period of Transition, 1749–1859,” Americas 54, no. 3 (January 1998): 323–56; Oscar Mazín Gómez, Entre dos majestades: El obispo y la iglesia del Gran Michoacán ante las reformas borbonicas, 1758–1772 (Zamora, Mexico: Colegio de Michoacán, 1987). 11. William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Adriaan C. van Oss, Catholic Colonialism: A Parish History of Guatemala, 1524– 1821 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 12. Bruce Taylor, Structures of Reform: The Mercedarian Order in the Spanish Golden Age (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2000); James Brodman, Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). 13. Louise Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); William F. Hanks, Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Jeanette Favrot Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); Delia Cosentino, Las joyas de Zinacantepec: Arte colonial en el Monasterio de San Miguel (Zinacantepec, Mexico: Colegio Mexiquense, 2003). 14. Luisa Zahino Peñafort, Iglesia y sociedad en México, 1765–1800: Tradición, reforma y reacciones (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996), 122–27. 15. Sally Falk Moore, Law and Anthropology: A Reader (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2004), 2. 16. Brian Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7. 17. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 5–6.

Chapter 2

Double Vision

Dichotomies in the Study of Latin America



Paul Ramírez

I sometimes assign Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl” in a course I teach on Spanish colonialism in the New World. It is a tale told by a Parisian regular at the Jardin des Plantes who finds himself obsessed with the primordial salamanders kept in the aquarium there. With their golden eyes and “little pink Aztec faces,” the axolotls are at once mysterious yet familiar, with humanlike feet and nails, eyes that “spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing,” and a certain impenetrable intelligence.1 About halfway through the story is a twist: the perspective switches momentarily from human to axolotl, then back again, until finally the human narrator finds that he has become the axolotl he was observing. Or was he the axolotl all along? I always enjoy conversations with my students about this text as they weave interpretive threads. Is it a parable about the all-consuming obsession of Westerners with gold and mineral wealth, one student asks? Are the water and tank that entrap the Aztec-like creature a metaphor for the weight and oppressiveness of European colonization? It is often the major plot development, when the one becomes the other, that catches the students off balance. Such boundaries are critical in defining ourselves and the things we study, after all. Why should an acceptance of their breach come naturally? The text is particularly illuminating in a course on Spanish colonialism, a process constructed from distinctions of race, ethnicity, and religion so rigid that they would seem to preclude such postmodernist flights of fancy.

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As early as 1492 Europeans were committed to a view of the ineradicable newness of the New World. Columbus’s letters conveyed “a world of objects that exceed his understanding of the probable and the familiar.”2 The difference imputed to new and old worlds manifested in intellectual assessments of the capacities of the inhabitants of the Americas, as in the sixteenthcentury debate between humanist scholars and friars about whether Native Americans were on the whole barbaric and thus natural slaves (a view put forth by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda) or rational beings who required ecclesiastical protection from the Spanish settlers who would take advantage of them (the view of the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas). Insistence on these essential binaries, whatever the inferences to be drawn, was remarkably resilient over time: near the end of the colonial period, in 1770, Spanish prelate Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, for several years the archbishop of Mexico, noted the radical difference of the Indies from Spain: “Two worlds God has placed in the hands of our Catholic Monarch, and the New does not resemble the Old, not in its climate, its customs, or its inhabitants.” 3 This dual conception of Europe and the Americas is no mere intellectual curiosity. Debates about the otherness of the New World undergirded and justified the entire colonial project of early Latin America and left deep marks in administrative, juridical, economic, and social realms. The categories español and indio took on lives of their own in Mesoamerica and the Andes as the institutionalization of the Spanish-Indian duality in colonial administrative systems came to organize and subsume a striking range of ethnicities, local affiliations, languages, and cultural subgroupings. This realization is often the starting point of any introductory course on Latin America. Why do we persist in using a seemingly insensitive and imprecise category, Indian, to describe the indigenous peoples of the Americas? The early establishment of repúblicas de indios, distinct from repúblicas de españoles, formalized one difference at the expense of countless others as populations were organized for labor, taxation, and conversion to Christianity. Eventually these formal legal units generated enormous quantities of documentation concerning territorial disputes, conflicts with abusive officials, marriages and deaths, the persecution of heterodoxy, and the defense or pursuit of privileges and exemptions. For about 300 years the categories were perpetuated in large part through these papers, which have proved so valuable in allowing historians to reconstruct colonial lives that the actors who

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fell through the juridical cracks, especially enslaved and free people of African descent, are often ignored or are studied apart.4 Because of these ubiquitous legal categories, students of Latin America’s colonial past suffer from a kind of double vision. We are conditioned by the sources and material to see in twos, beset on all sides by dichotomies, whose Greek etymology (dikotomía) indicates an act of cutting: to shear one part away from the whole. This act is evident, for example, in the distinction that Catholic priests often made between internal and external, as in the care of souls and the care of bodies. It is evident in the concept of the Catholic Monarch invoked by Archbishop Lorenzana above, which referred to the notion that the souls in Spain and its American colonies had been entrusted to the Spanish king by God, to be returned at the end of earthly time, as well as to the idea that the Church and the state were inextricably and harmoniously bound in the colonizing project.5 It is also evident in the way that friars in New Spain and the Andes who faced imperfect conversions to Catholicism insisted on explaining the shortcomings in terms of clear-cut idolatrous departures from Christian behavior, even if in reality Andeans might turn simultaneously to an efficacious Catholic saint and to the huaca (sacred) forces contained in a rock outcropping.6 Twos are so prevalent that at times it seems they determine not only our teaching but also our research agendas. How else to explain the peculiar absence of people of African descent from studies of the colonial centers of Latin America? What else could account for the unfortunate split we encounter between historians who focus on rural villages, where people often made their living from the land, and those who write on urban centers such as Lima, Potosí, Mexico City, Veracruz, or Guanajuato, where Spanish merchants, miners, and professionals rubbed elbows with an underclass of Indian, mulatto, mestizo, and poor white residents making their living in obrajes (textile workshops), tobacco plants, or transportation or as day laborers? The exceptions are few, yet we know that people regularly migrated, spent part of the year in one place and part in another, or exchanged goods and news between one sphere and the other. Some indios lived in pueblos of no more than a few hundred people, whereas others lived in highly urbanized towns; some worked their own plots of land, whereas others toiled on landed estates of several thousand acres; many produced largely within the confines of their villages, whereas others spent time earning money in mining centers

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or carrying out labor rotations on public works projects; and plenty of Spaniards lived in Indian villages, legal prescriptions to the contrary notwithstanding. The interactions that came about through the social and economic ligaments binding regions and continents are easily obscured when our scholarly habits fragment people into city and countryside; so are the circuits through which sugar, silver, dyes, and other Spanish American products flowed when we insist too strongly on such divisions. The French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss thought that double vision was inescapable, and that may be true. He claimed that dualities do important cultural work: mythology, art, music, kinship organization, and even scholarship, no doubt, reflect the structure of the mind and stand as examples of a society’s classification of itself and its store of knowledge.7 In this structural patterning, symmetry between terms is expressed in rich but logical ways: left is related to right, high to low, male to female, raw to cooked, sound to silence. The one becomes inexplicable without the other. For Lévi-Strauss the only real false dichotomy was the one that insisted on a distinction between present and past—between Western classification systems, often distinguished as empirical, and the “primitive” classifications of everyone else. If we translate this position into the terms of Cortázar’s story, any absolute boundary that divides us from the subjects we study in the past is illusory: the wondrous creatures in their tanks, who seem to have their own way of seeing, are even more familiar to us than we care to recognize. If that is the case, and we are as indebted to dichotomous thinking as the bishops, priests, jurists, and kings of the past, then what is the best path forward? In the following pages I suggest a few ways to approach the study of Latin America’s dichotomous colonial history. Above all, the goal is to resist the temptation simply to erase the reality of these structures. We must instead take them seriously precisely because they could be so deadly serious for the people we study. It is helpful to consider the institutions that reify and reproduce dichotomies, because inevitably the twos we see have been conditioned by them; to understand local contexts and in particular the mediators who straddled dichotomous worlds; and to look for change over time in the dualities we find, which means appreciating that other categories, actors, and factors mediated them—that these categories were contingent, not simply determined forever and always. I offer an episode from colonial Mexico’s first experiments with vaccination

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against smallpox early in the nineteenth century as an illustration. Antonio de Bergosa y Jordán (1748–1819), the bishop of Oaxaca at the time of the royal vaccinating expedition’s departure for New Spain, was one of many officials tasked with introducing the new medical technology in Spain’s American colonies. The pastoral letter he circulated to parishes in his diocese late in 1804 deliberately bridged the ostensible divide between monarchy and religion, care of soul and of body, and celestial and terrestrial. Both the prelate and the letter he produced stand as evidence of the shape-shifting nature of intermediaries and mediating documents and their importance for the history of medicine and public health in Latin America. My contention is that if we approach our object of study with these things in mind, we too stand to be awed by some rather extraordinary transformations. Scholars have devised a range of interpretations and explanations for the splitting of elite from popular and literate from illiterate, along with the split in worldviews that this is supposed to have entailed. According to Peter Burke, it was during the Enlightenment, when European intellectuals sought to nourish national identities, that a “discovery” of the culture of das Volk, or the masses, took place as the folklore of peasants and craftsmen was collected and disseminated to make them embody a national spirit or consciousness.8 People became aware of difference in new ways, according to this interpretation, and in the process regional expressions of culture were converted into a unified whole: alternately idealized or ostracized as simple, natural, traditional, and exotic, often in rigid opposition to the culture of the elite, despite the fact that early modern Europe’s upper classes frequently participated in the lifeways and symbolic systems of “ordinary people.” In colonial Latin America, it would be easy to identify an analogous process in the fashion for a type of visual representation of dichotomies known as cuadros de castas. These paintings of mixed-race individuals conceptualized and classified binaries of race and culture in frames that colorfully depicted mixed couples and their offspring in scenes of domestic tranquility or turmoil, often alongside the exotic products of the New World. Thus their subjects were frozen in time, to be consumed on the walls of elite homes; it did not much matter that society was hardly the ordered reality appearing in these objects of art, or that people grouped as indios or la plebe (the common people) came in many more shapes and sizes.

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But the ordering impulse identified for the Enlightenment was not in itself all that new. Long before Spaniards began migrating to the Americas, since at least its early medieval years, Christianity was characterized by an insistent if futile drive toward doctrinal purity and ritual conformity, which depended on a constellation of disciplinary discourses and techniques. As traced by Carlos Eire, a historian of medieval and early modern Europe, this policing activity, which persisted through the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation institutionalized in the Council of Trent (1545–1563), a clerical elite pursued orthodoxy in religious practice in part by condemning any perceived drift toward syncretism, polytheism, and superstition. Because literate clerics were often responsible for this policing activity (even if almost everyone seems to have transgressed the boundaries of what was appropriate or permissible at some time), one legacy is our tendency to reify the official institutional Church as starkly opposed to whatever was popular and illiterate.9 Of course, official intolerance of alternative lifeways at the institutional level could also inadvertently highlight the diversity of laypeople. Spanish American bishops performing reviews of their dioceses so often inveighed against adultery, concubinage, bigamy, gambling, drunkenness, idolatry, theft, abortion, and sodomy because Catholics were exceedingly diverse in their worldviews and practices.10 Even members of institutions dedicated to policing orthodox practice could simultaneously be participants in the devotional communities they policed: at the shrine of Our Lady of the Angels, on the northern outskirts of the viceregal capital, a senior Inquisition judge, along with the corregidor (Spanish administrator) of Mexico City, appears to have been taking part in a majority Indian shrine devotion toward the end of the eighteenth century, precisely when Church reformers were supposed to be campaigning to dampen enthusiasm for geographically peripheral devotions.11 Although social differences undoubtedly matter in the study of religious practice, one historian of “popular Catholicism” warns that “we cannot assign distinct religious styles to specific social levels or groups.” 12 Avoiding this tendency is easier said than done, insofar as we have been conditioned to think that literate and illiterate people eventually came to see and interpret the world around them in distinct and nonoverlapping ways. A shift to local contexts and perspectives suggests fruitful alternative views. For example, by substituting categories of analysis such as “local religion” for the elite-popular dichotomy, which William Christian proposes, we

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can both account for the relative autonomy of the ritual practice of the Castilian countryside from the institutional authority of Rome and acknowledge the possibility of elite participation. “In Toledo,” Christian wrote in illustrating the merits of this approach, “women who wished to be cured of çiçiones (probably malaria) would sweep the church of Santiago on Saturdays. When Charles V had malaria, he too swept the church.” 13 Similarly, while the institutional Church could appear as a unified foe to the faithful, there was often great variation among priests and their work in parishes. Here too, local perspectives can move us beyond stereotypical attitudes and stock characters.14 But if Eire is correct about the policing tendencies of the early modern Church, and Lévi-Strauss about our involvement in cultural schema in which dichotomies prevail, then some structures must have conditioned these seemingly local and autonomous settings as well. How do we account for them? In her reinterpretation of witchcraft in colonial Mexico, Laura Lewis, an anthropologist by training, argued that we should take dichotomies more seriously. She posited two domains in colonial Mexico: one condoned by the state, in which certain identities, practices, and spaces were valued more highly than others (e.g., male versus female, Spanish versus Indian, and urban versus rural); and the other unsanctioned, in which the evaluations within the sanctioned realm were reversed in such a way that the magical potions and rituals condemned by the Church might be prized more highly by the many residents, including literate male Spaniards, who had recourse to them. Within this unsanctioned realm, even Indian subalterns, Lewis noted, were able to exercise power through witchcraft. Because Africans, mestizos, mulattoes, and Spaniards alike negotiated these sanctioned and unsanctioned realms, the two domains should not be kept apart: witchcraft “was as central to colonial reality as labor practices or civil controls.” 15 Criticisms of Lewis’s book have targeted precisely the dual framework at its core. For instance, “while claiming to unpack the ethnic hierarchy Lewis tends to flatten it into archetypal groupings,” one reviewer wrote. Colonial society is “structured into neat geometric patterns” in the book, which left another reviewer “with the feeling of having been presented with a neat reordering of a subtle and complex reality into a rather predictable set of archetypes.” 16 In toppling one dichotomy, Lewis has simply replaced it with others, in this view. These are welcome criticisms: Lewis’s structural

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oppositions—female is to male as Indian is to Spaniard, for example—were surely not operative in all colonial situations or even in all the cases she identified. But such criticisms point us beyond the virtues or shortcomings of Lewis’s book to a broader question: How much simplification is permissible in any scholarly work? Even as we recognize how much men and women, or members of distinct castes, had in common with each other, we cannot wish away the distinctions wrought by legal categories or the patterned meanings of gender differences within colonial society. For one reason, all of us seek structures in our lives and in our work, drawing to some extent on culturally specific taxonomies into which to fit the messy, “subtle and complex reality.” Thus, to make sense of archival material we reach for familiar grooves or schemata, such as rural and urban or elite and plebian, that are shaped collectively within our own intellectual or scholarly “societies.” 17 This is the nature of a map; we are always in pursuit of one that encompasses the complexity of reality, but the result inevitably reflects the fact that we are all, to some extent, system builders as well, as likely to draw on structures from our cultural frameworks as the people we study were. We are axolotls, too. Lewis’s study does more than describe and elevate prevalent dichotomies, however. It also points us toward the many individuals who inhabited two or more worlds at once, the people who did not fit neatly into categories of indio and español, including the numerous individuals of African descent who participated in the rituals of witchcraft. One way to bridge historical and scholarly schemata is to follow the lead of these go-betweens and intermediaries. Mediators came in all shapes and sizes: they spoke multiple languages, held an interstitial position as racially mixed offspring, or were appointed to translate or transpose information from one system to another. Steve Stern’s study of colonialism in Huamanga, Peru, identifies a kuraka (Incan official) class whose members became key cultural and economic negotiators under Spanish rule, helping to meet mita (compulsory labor rotation) obligations and collect tribute but also beholden to the communities they were committed to represent.18 Parish priests constituted another class of go-betweens who straddled Spanish and American, elite and popular, and celestial and terrestrial worlds: members of an educated, literate elite class, they were also deeply embedded in rural life, from which position they mediated between peasants and artisans, on the one hand, and those higher up on the chain of

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colonial governance, on the other.19 Like the many different kinds of people considered healers who appear in the archives of the Inquisition—moving between the covert world of herbs, stones, and chants and a variety of lovesick, homesick, and suffering patients, some of whom were from the upper echelons of colonial society—all these individuals were more or less adept at their work and just as prone to shifting social pressures, commitments, and interests. Because mediators had to contend not just with different classes, languages, and ethnicities but also with transformation in their own social, economic, and political contexts, some appreciation of the way they grappled with these things renders any dichotomy a more supple and contingent matter. The history of medicine and public health in the Americas presents fertile terrain on which to examine mediators in action, and in the remaining pages I suggest an approach that I have found useful in my research. A perennial shortage of trained European practitioners in colonial Latin America, combined with expensive shipping costs, vulnerability to New World diseases, and the extraordinary expertise of New World healers, meant that Spanish colonists learned quickly to appreciate the medicinal plants, knowledge, and practitioners in their new home.20 So eager was Phillip II to glean its medical virtues that a 1577 questionnaire circulated to the Indies included multiple items soliciting further information about cures, including this one: “What are the herbs or aromatic plants that the Indians use to heal themselves? What are their medicinal or poisonous properties?” 21 During a seven-year expedition in New Spain to collect and catalog these plants around the same time, the royal botanist and physician Francisco Hernández collaborated closely with indigenous informants and artists to produce a systematic compendium of Mesoamerican botanical knowledge that identified more than 3,000 plants and their uses.22 These collaborations await further study, but it’s safe to say that they happened practically everywhere: friars working in mission communities, for instance, took responsibility for healing alongside a plethora of Nahua, Guaraní, Mapuche, and Andean healers, and as a result of these interactions New World novelties like bezoar stones, coca leaves, cinchona bark, tobacco, and cacao, along with knowledge of their medicinal properties, moved on both sides of the Atlantic.

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These transatlantic exchanges of plants, minerals, and medical knowledge continued into the eighteenth century. Most notably, three expeditions—to New Spain, Nueva Granada, and the coast of Chile—formally undertook to examine and collect precious plants to take back to the new botanical gardens of Europe. A fourth expedition, sponsored by Charles IV after an outbreak of smallpox struck Bogotá (in Nueva Granada, now Colombia), had in mind a more direct intervention in disease outbreaks. The technology at issue was the cowpox vaccine recently publicized by Edward Jenner, which offered a safer prophylactic against human smallpox. A supply of small pox vaccine was transported to the Indies aboard a ship carrying physicians, nurses, and orphaned children who were vaccinated en route to keep the precious lymph viable until its arrival in the Americas. In contrast to previous expeditions, the purpose of this one was the universal vaccination of a population uniformly susceptible to the ravages of smallpox, including inhabitants of the remote countryside. Who would mediate the vaccine’s introduction and deliver it to these distant places? The matter was complicated by changes in the ideologies of governance and statecraft at the time. In Spanish America reigning corporate and individual privileges and exemptions posed serious obstacles to enlightened ministers who were trying to impose more rational governance and increase the political and economic power of the secular state. One solution was to circumscribe and delineate sacerdotal functions: in the reformed view, priests in their parishes were to be teachers but not judges, an activity newly reserved for royal or secular courts. Nor were they to be vaccinators or physicians of the body.23 Official decrees and instructions on immunization remitted to viceroys and district governors in the months preceding the arrival of the vaccinating expedition were explicit about the special persuasive power of pastors in their parishes, which was to be directed toward the promotion of the vaccine. In the Enlightenment view, the clergymen were expert in the symbolic realm—ceremony and pageantry. In the medical, by contrast, practitioners trained in the Jennerian method of immunization were to take responsibility for the operation. The boundary-policing activity identified by Eire for the medieval and early modern periods thus found new life in public health campaigns during Mexico’s Enlightenment. Yet old habits died hard. Copies of a pastoral letter (carta apostólica) issued December 7, 1804, circulated throughout the bishopric of Oaxaca. The

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letter, or edict, was recorded in parish books, with relevant portions likely read aloud in full or in part during Mass. Like sermons, the pastoral letter was textual but also steeped in oral tradition and aimed at multiple groups at once. After the conventional prelude, in which Bishop Bergosa addressed his “beloved priests, vicars, and other ecclesiastics, and all the faithful of this our bishopric,” the letter summarized the history of the vaccine, beginning with the “wise physician Jenner” and his 1797 experiments with cows. It reiterated the dangers of vaccination with spurious lymph, echoed medical and imperial texts on the near universality of the practice in other enlightened monarchies, and noted that the incision was made so lightly in the skin that “fathers, mothers, or chichiguas [from Nahua, meaning wet nurse] can do it without fear, and with the same felicity and good effect, because in fact it is an operation more proper to women for their softer hands.” Invoking “my beloved children” and “my beloved faithful,” Bergosa exhorted his audience, “Do not waste this precious treasure. . . . Do not look insensitively on a remedy that costs you nothing and matters so much to you. Do not allow a sudden plague of smallpox to snatch your children and grandchildren from your arms for the tomb, covering your hearts and poor chozas in mourning, but instead vaccinate them in a timely fashion, which will be the same as liberating them from smallpox and death.” 24 Forty days’ indulgence was promised to those who willingly submitted to vaccination, those who performed it, and those who toiled charitably in support of it. Notably, Bishop Bergosa exhorted priests in the diocese to vaccinate in their parishes when trained practitioners were unavailable and offered to distribute iron implements for use as lancets to vicars and priests who requested them. For a regalist bishop it was an appropriate response to the Crown’s ambitious public health campaign, but from the perspective of reformist ministers he had overreached. His instructions clearly conceived of a more expansive role for the ecclesiastical hierarchy than as mere handmaidens to Bourbon initiatives. By any standard this ecclesiastical text was a strange creature. It blended the conventions of a genre ordinarily dedicated to the instruction of parish priests and the moral reform of parishioners with those of a medical tract.25 Portions were lifted almost verbatim from at least one medical pamphlet: a Spanish translation of a French work describing the origins and practice of vaccination, published in 1801 (which similarly envisioned the procedure as so straightforward and safe that even parents could perform it).26 We can

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imagine the bishop sitting at his writing desk with a copy of the medical instruction propped open before him, channeling its author’s special learning to compose a Catholic missive that was unprecedented in its references. We know much about how the pervasive male-female dichotomy was transgressed in colonial settings as actors engaged in various types of genderbending behaviors; genre-bending of this kind calls us back to the axolotl’s tank, staring intently to discern what is inside. If we’re left wondering what to call this peculiar work, there is no doubt about the momentary confusion produced by this shape-shifting pastoral letter. I have stressed the fact that although many agreed that priests would in some way bridge the gap in knowledge between medical experts and the laity, there was disagreement over the scope of this mediating activity as some sought to redefine it. The bishop intended to comply with the mandates of Bourbon rulers but worked against them by following his own experience in his diocese, where medicine and spirituality were not nearly so distinguishable and where trained practitioners remained few and far between. Realizing his transgression, Bergosa sent a copy of his pastoral letter to Spain with a cover letter in which he wondered whether he had countermanded the king’s wishes by issuing it. The matter produced a minor crisis as the king’s advisory council debated the contents of the document. One official remarked that the bishop’s guidelines conformed so closely with what had been written on the smallpox vaccine that he “appears to have formed an extract of the best authors, a fact even more considerable insofar as it is simpler and accommodated to the limited knowledge of the practitioners and curanderos [healers] usually found in the interior pueblos of his diocese.” Nevertheless, it seemed prudent to restrict vaccinations, at least in the beginning, to expert physicians who could distinguish between real and spurious cases of cowpox. The official recommended that the bishop be praised for his zeal but also be charged with ensuring that the priests abstain from vaccinating and limit themselves to exhorting the public and to their other duties.27 A second official thought otherwise: for the present, restrictions would be respected to avoid the introduction of spurious cowpox, but the operation was simple enough that it should eventually be popularized (vulgarizarle), as the bishop recommended. Especially in villages lacking practitioners—and even in those that had an abundance of healers, once an accessible instruction became available—administrators should see that the procedure became

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“popular and common” so that even the mothers of children could practice, “as is seen in many parts.” The Crown remitted orders to this effect to the bishop of Oaxaca and the viceroy of New Spain two weeks later: temporary restriction, followed by orders that vaccination practice be “popular and common” in New Spain.28 In one stroke, Spain’s government, inspired by the bishop’s initiative, managed to revise its stance on a number of dichotomies, including the boundary between expert and lay, religion and medicine, and men and women. If from one perspective it was inevitable that a class of professionals would be distinguished from laypeople in matters of medicine, from Bergosa’s point of view the future looked rather different. In the following months and years, he and his fellow bishops turned to the mundane though not unimportant matter of finding adequate funding for vaccination campaigns and the maintenance of a viable reservoir of vaccine, tasks that became increasingly difficult as insurgency wars in Mexico disrupted production and commerce. District administrators and members of city councils coordinated ceremonial displays that welcomed the vaccinating expedition, which included not only bottles of aguardiente (a distilled liquor resembling brandy), cookies, and small sums of money for children but also carefully staged rituals of thanksgiving with fireworks and music erupting around illuminated churches. Unlicensed irregular healers worked alongside university-trained physicians and surgeons as well as barbers, parish priests, and secular officials to transport vials of cowpox and vaccinated children across difficult terrain to new towns and villages. It was a chaotic and at times disorderly scenario. Nevertheless, to a considerable extent this diversity of actors, who in their writing and actions blurred the line between spiritual and material economies, urban and rural, and professionals and laypeople, was responsible for the willingness of numerous parents to see in this initiative something more than another plank in the Bourbon agenda to interfere in village life and extract more revenue from their labor. For me, Cortázar’s amphibious story has always been about moments of transition and in-between people and things. I have suggested how a particularly rich and surprising document can help us locate these moments, when things were nearly otherwise, but there are other ways to go about reckoning with dichotomies in productive ways. First, we can do what Carlos

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Eire proposed in his consideration of the concept of “popular religion” by owning up to “the binary structure of religion in the West,” whether those binaries are sociocultural, spatial, analytical, or historical. Simultaneously, it helps to remember that dichotomies are produced contingently and to work with a healthy dose of hermeneutics: like us, many of the actors we study have displayed remarkable complexity in their thought, with a high level of tolerance for ambiguity. Insisting too much on one or two pairs in opposition leads us to lose sight of the shared understanding, overlapping worldviews, and internal fissures that brought people of different groups together—and kept those within the same category apart. We should be attentive to change; even Lévi-Strauss was quick to point out (following the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure) that the structure of things is prone to be modified, unstable, and asymmetrical, thanks to the events of time. And we can linger longer on the intermediaries, great and small, in each of our places and times of study, whose comments sometimes articulated surprising worldviews. Thompson’s metaphor for the middle classes in England is apt here: he imagined members as iron filings oriented along a force field toward two distinct poles, “bound by lines of magnetic dependency to the rulers” but occasionally “hiding their faces in common action with the crowd.” 29 At the interface between state and society, even administrators could be heterogeneous in their interests, and the documents they produced occasionally embedded these multiple perspectives and experiences. Sometimes a bit of luck leads the tenacious researcher to one of these genre-bending documents that cause us to question what we are reading, what we are seeing, and what we are doing.30 Stare long enough at a person, a broadside, a chronicle, a map, a petition, an altarpiece, a last will and testament, a pastoral letter, or even an axolotl, and you may find something in it and in yourself that shocks and surprises. If Bourbon rulers could shift their perspective on the New World, surely we can, too.

Notes 1. Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” in Blow-Up and Other Stories, trans. Paul Backburn (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 3–9. 2. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 75. The Spaniard settlers and conquistadors who set down their

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

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impressions are too numerous to list, but among the most ethnographically interesting are accounts by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and the German Hans Staden, whose fearful stories of captivity among the Tupinamba of modern Brazil fueled European imaginations further in the popular woodcut engravings of Theodor de Bry. Quoted in Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 39. Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). A number of examples from colonial Mexico could be cited of this conception of the state, but here is an instance from late in the eighteenth century. The document establishing a junta de caridad during an epidemic of smallpox—a committee composed of secular and ecclesiastical members to collect alms and care for Mexico City’s poor and destitute—refers both to the celestial origins of the terrestrial state and to the principle of the Spanish state as a function of two authorities working in tandem. Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Bienes Nacionales, vol. 754, exp. 1, Orizaba, October 23, 1797, Marqués de Branciforte to Archbishop of Mexico, 3r–v. In midcolonial Andean society these polarities were artificially exacerbated during periodic idolatry inspections (visitas de idolatría) to police religious life. Kenneth Mills, “The Limits of Religious Coercion in Mid-Colonial Peru,” Past and Present 145 (November 1994): 114–20. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 13–16; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 6, 53, 57, 64, 87–96. Thompson proposed something altogether less consensual, unified, and circumscribed than Burke’s “popular culture,” yet in these essays (first published in the 1970s) he too stressed an increasing polarization of the customs of English plebeians and those of the patrician class in the eighteenth century. Carlos Eire, “The Concept of Popular Religion,” in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, ed. Martin Austin Nesvig (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 1–35. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 6–8. This historian of religion has made a similar point for Judaism. Boundaries are indispensable components of religious identity and thought, yet at Judaism’s heart there is a diversity that belies its supposed normativity and policing of distinctions between me and you, us and them. This reality compels us to speak of “Judaisms,” in the plural; the same could be said in favor of “Catholicisms.” Paul Ramírez and William B. Taylor, “Out of Tlatelolco’s Ruins: Patronage,

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12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

Paul Ramírez

Devotion, and Natural Disaster at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Angels, 1745– 1781,” Hispanic American Historical Review 93, no. 1 (February 2013): 33–65. For a study of a Franciscan pastor’s devotion to the shrine image of his parishioners, see William B. Taylor, “Between Nativitas and Mexico City: An EighteenthCentury Pastor’s Local Religion,” in Nesvig, Local Religion, 91–117. Keith Luria, “‘Popular Catholicism’ and the Catholic Reformation,” in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honor of John O’Malley, ed. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 115. William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 157. William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). For an anthropologist’s methodological remarks on the diversity of categories necessary to understand these actors, see Stanley Brandes, “Conclusion: Reflections on the Study of Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in Europe,” in Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society, ed. Ellen Badone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 185–99. Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 11. Eric Van Young, Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 1 (February 2005): 183–85; Fernando Cervantes, Law and History Review 24, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 455–56. Not only anthropologists insist on this point; see the remarks on Jack H. Hexter’s notion of the historian’s “second record” in the introduction to this volume. Steve Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). William B. Taylor, “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into the Social History of Early Latin America, 1500–1900,” in Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, ed. Olivier Zunz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 115–90. Taylor has highlighted this mediating function. By the time of the mature colony, intermediaries were everywhere, but perhaps nowhere more readily available than in the resources of the Catholic Church. A variation of this argument has been put forth in Sherry Fields, Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Instrucción y memoria de las relaciones que se han de hacer para la descripción de las Indias, que Su Majestad manda hacer para el buen gobierno y ennoblecimiento de ellas, item 26, 1577. Although the original compendium was lost in the Escorial fire in 1671, edited versions circulated to Italy, the Netherlands, and England, suggesting the vast reach of New World materia medica. See Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and

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23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

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Dora B. Weiner, eds., Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), particularly the chapters by J. Worth Estes, José M. López Piñero and José Pardo Tomás, and Rafael Chabrán and Simon Varey. On the new late colonial conception of the role of parish priests and their relationship to secular authority, see Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, chaps. 7 and 16. Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Indiferente, 1558a, Villa de Etla, December 7, 1804, Nos el Doctor Don Antonio Bergosa, 818–20. I follow William Hanks, who has written variously of “ambivalent genres,” “boundary works,” “blended genres,” and “colonial genres” to characterize novel discourse practices among the colonial Maya Indians. William F. Hanks, “Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 4 (1987): 64–88; William F. Hanks, ed., “Language and Discourse in Colonial Yucatán [1996],” in Intertexts (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 271–311. Pedro Hernández, ed., Orígen y descubrimiento de la vaccina (Madrid: Oficina de don Benito García, 1801). AGI, Indiferente, 1558a, n.p., n.d. (“Nota” following summary of bishop’s letter of December 11), 810v–11v. AGI, Indiferente, 1558a, n.p., May 25, 1805, 811v–12v; AGI, Indiferente, 1558a, Madrid, July 12, 1805, Crown to Obispo de Antequera de Oaxaca; AGI, Indiferente, 1558a, Madrid, July 12, 1805, Crown to Viceroy of New Spain, 835r–v. Thompson, Customs in Common, 73. Adapting social anthropologist Robert Redfield’s binary model, Peter Burke argues that genres like chapbooks and broadsides commonly bridged the “great” and “little” traditions as productions that contained the horizons of both worlds and their people. Even before the great bifurcation of the eighteenth century, the cultural elite often participated both in the “great tradition” of Latin and literary forms and the “little tradition” of markets, public squares, and festivals. These actors were distinguished by being “amphibious, bi-cultural, and also bilingual” in contrast to the ordinary people, who spoke only their regional dialect. Burke, Popular Culture, 28–29, 63.

Chapter 3

Making Sense of Geographies

Regionalism in the Study of Latin American History



Nicole von Germeten

Inspired by the creative interpretative historical methodology of Natalie Zemon Davis and Inga Clendinnen, this chapter offers methods for how researchers can begin to problematize the concept of Latin American regionalism in their own work.1 My framework is two case studies, two lives of seventeenth-century Afro-descended men. I chose these individuals for the density of the surviving historical documentation, not because their lives ran in perfectly parallel tracks. In fact, they veered off in dramatically different directions. I allow myself a measured freedom in my presentation of how their regions of residence influenced their lives. To quote Davis, “What I offer here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.” 2 Through my interpretation of these biographies, I will highlight what I view as several key dimensions of regionalism in Latin America. Instead of relying on theories that may or may not be applicable or historiographies that may or may not connect broadly, this chapter instead provokes students of history to consider the complexity of regional difference in their own research and how to push this concept beyond geographic place.3 Before telling the stories of the two men, I must clarify what regionalism means, especially in the context of geography. We can start by defining geography simply as the physical features of the earth and how humans interact with it. This seems straightforward, but looking more closely, we notice that Edward Said’s idea of imaginative geography intersects with how inhabitants of a particular geographic space interpret how their region exists in relation

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to another.4 Said’s work is just one example of how geography as a term has more complexity than just place and human interactions with physical space. Similarly, when we search for a definition of regionalism, we discover a variety of answers as well as a warning. Eric Van Young cautioned historians not to view regions just as “the area we are studying at the moment,” but instead as “hypotheses to be proven.” He emphasized region as “a spacialization of an economic relationship.” 5 The case studies presented here go beyond economic regionalism, arguing that regional difference extends into individual understandings of the sacred and even the mental and emotional realms. My focus will be on how regionalism, especially in terms of economic variation, racial hierarchies, Spanish administrative divisions, and even spiritual or miraculous conceptions of space, is reflected in the lives of two individuals. My goal is to show how the idea of regionalism can open up more avenues for historical contextualization and even well-grounded imaginative interpretations of how the region of residence affects an individual’s expression and self-presentation. Region and geography coincide in a variety of confusing ways in historical scholarship, proving Van Young’s suggestion that regions can be viewed as working hypotheses. In Many Mexicos, originally published in 1941, Lesley Byrd Simpson defined Mexico’s multiple, distinct regions in terms of their geography, geology, and climate.6 Although he demonstrated that the physical barriers that isolated and separated vast territories played a significant role in the history of Mexico (something that holds true for Latin America in general), there are other fruitful ways to think about regional difference other than physical geography.7 For example, William Taylor noted that travelers to Mexico will observe “many Mexicos” but will encounter more “Mexicos” than Simpson described. Taylor stated that his goal as a historian has been to make “Mexico larger and smaller,” to appreciate the extensive territory of the Viceroyalty of New Spain with an emphasis on local histories centered on specific places and the juxtaposition of those histories to “gain some comparative perspective and wider scope.” 8 In the last four decades Taylor has used this approach in his studies of crime and rebellion, land tenure, and religion, with an emphasis on the strong influence on regional difference. These kinds of local and regional historical studies, the publication of which picked up dramatically in the late 1960s and the 1970s, provide an important corrective to gross generalizations

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of a homogeneous impact of Spanish rule on diverse areas of the Americas.9 When historians start work on a new project, they now must have a sense of how their place of interest differs from other regions in Latin America, but they may find that they need to argue for their own particular conception of regionalism. Another hypothesis on regionalism can be found in the textbook Early Latin America by James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz. This text emphasizes the idea of core areas or centers and margins or peripheries as the fundamental organizing principle for understanding colonial Latin American history.10 This dichotomy suffers from oversimplicity, but it does highlight some issues that I will touch on when I turn to my case studies. Lockhart and Schwartz’s distinction between centers and peripheries is primarily historical, based on precolonial civilizations, their resources, and later, under colonial rule, the strength of their long-term interactions with Europeans.11 The authors build on the basic premise that regions with densely populated precolonial urban centers drew Spanish settlement, and they identify Mesoamerica and the central Andes as the geographic foci of colonialism, where “the Europeans concentrated their activities.” 12 Central areas or cores had large populations, hierarchical societies, and great potential for mineral wealth, all of which eventually led to the growth of transit routes linking mines to port cities and to a proliferation of Spanish cities populated by ecclesiastics, bureaucrats, and merchants as well as African, Indian, and racially-mixed servants, craftsmen, small-business owners, and laborers. Agricultural land surrounded the mines and cities, providing corn, wheat, meat, and the raw ingredients for cheap locally made clothes. By the early seventeenth century economic regional differences were well established, and they remained in place until shifts in the mid- to late eighteenth century with the administrative and economic reforms put into effect by Bourbon Crown bureaucrats. Even then the basic elements of regional difference persisted well into the national period. As we have seen, scholars such as Lockhart, Schwartz, Taylor, Van Young, and Simpson all approached regionalism from slightly different arguable hypotheses, beyond simply geographic place. A researcher should consider all of them (and more) over the course of his or her project’s development. Now we will turn to the main characters in this chapter and my own hypotheses about two different regions. In 1592 Diego López was born a slave

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in Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia, what was then known as the New Kingdom of Granada. Official documentation labels him a mulatto and does not provide any other details about his family.13 He worked in local hospitals, gaining enough experience and clientele to become a freedman surgeon before his midthirties. Along with attaining this occupational success, López achieved notoriety through his involvement in a circle of female Afro-descended love-magic practitioners. In the 1630s the local tribunal of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition found López and the women guilty of making pacts with Satan and taking part in orgies with demons. López was sentenced to a public march in an auto-da-fé and 200 lashes. After this public and painful humiliation, López left to ply his trade in another town but later returned to Cartagena to work as a surgeon in its busy portside hospitals.14 Another man of African ancestry, Juan Correa, was born in 1646 in Mexico City. His parents were Juan Correa Sr., a surgeon, and Pascuala de Santoya, a Mexican-born morena (dark-skinned) freedwoman.15 Correa’s legacy survives in the form of dozens of works of art displayed and celebrated in several countries as among the best representations of baroque painting in New Spain.16 As a leader and an inspector in the painters’ guild, Correa exercised considerable power over other members. His position, and the apparent lack of a detrimental influence of the mulatto label on his successful career, meant that Spanish painters had to be judged by a mulatto.17 The painter died in respectable circumstances in 1716, owning enough property and wealth to enjoy an honorable funeral with all of the appropriate baroque pomp. Of course, the particulars of lineage, personal character, and life choices shaped these men’s dramatically diverging fates, but regional difference also influenced their lives and serves as a critical node for exploring their very dissimilar biographies. The locations of Cartagena and Mexico City affected how López and Correa forged their destinies through their career prospects, the different steps they took to advance their chosen careers, and most especially their contrasting opportunities for family support and upwardly mobile social ties. In other words, despite the fact that both cities were important centers in the seventeenth-century Spanish empire, living one’s life in either Cartagena or Mexico City led to different on-the-ground interpretations of geography. This chapter explores regional difference as manifested in the following subsets: historical place and geography; sacred

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geography and baroque infrastructure; demography, infrastructure, and politics; local religion; and, in terms of what we know about them, regionalism’s continuing legacies.

Sacred Geography and Baroque Infrastructure One of the best examples of the lasting importance of sacred geography is Mexico City, or Tenochtitlán, later an artistic and spiritual center of baroque infrastructure. The indigenous residents of Tenochtitlán envisioned themselves as at the center of their cosmos, living on or near the sites where creation stories or battles among supernatural forces actually took place, at an intersection of the worldly and the otherworldly. Centuries later, beliefs in the local presence of divine forces in certain specific locales shaped Juan Correa’s life. Mexico City and its surrounding areas hosted many miracles and miraculous images, a legacy that in some ways dates back to the time when the Mexica ruled from Tenochtitlán. The sacredness of local geography and its connection of humans, nature, and the supernatural lived on long after the Spanish disposed of the Mexica rulers based in Tenochtitlán. We can imagine that Correa, as a painter of religious images, drew from indigenous and colonial ideas about sacred geography and regionally popular saints as he expressed the material nature of this baroque ideology through imagery.18 In his lifetime Correa received commissions from farflung religious institutions throughout New Spain and beyond, but the dense web of baroque structures in Mexico City itself offered him his most secure patronage. Many of the city’s numerous friaries, palaces, parish churches, colleges, and other buildings expanded or added new chapels, facades, or other ornamental features during Correa’s lifetime, providing the artist and his workshop with hundreds of commissions.19 The broad extension of Correa’s work was in part a result of Mexico City’s importance as a center of baroque art production for the Spanish American viceroyalties and even beyond into other Catholic regions of the world. As a port and the site of an Inquisition high court, a slave market, a leper colony, a military base, and a prison colony, Cartagena sat at the center of a web of colonial institutions, similar but on a smaller scale to Mexico City. Before and after the Spanish military conquest that began in the 1530s, the area was not as densely populated as central Mexico, nor was Cartagena built

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on the foundations of a sacred indigenous city, as Mexico City was on Tenochtitlán. So even though it was certainly an important Spanish city, Cartagena lacked Mexico City’s dominance as the sacred center of both precolonial and colonial empires and never emerged as a great American baroque center. Sacred geography and its foci in Spanish America thus affected Diego López simply in the sense that an artistic and architectural expression of baroque spirituality never flourished in Cartagena to the degree that it did in Mexico City. Compared to Mexico City, Cartagena was an artistic backwater, and it is less likely that a mulatto man would find a career in this realm or in any of the numerous supporting occupations and crafts related to it. My understanding of regionalism here suggests the following questions: How do indigenous ideas of sacred and physical geography carry through from before the conquest into later eras? Did they affect the institutions and career opportunities available to the colonial subjects? What role did location play in the spread of someone’s influence, work, or ideas?

Demography, Economics, and Politics Regional political, economic, and demographic variation strongly affected the two men’s prospects. An essential consideration for any researcher perceptive to regional difference is demography, suggesting the following kinds of questions: What can demography, politics, and economics tell us about a region that other elements do not? How much demographic background is necessary, and what aspects of demography matter most? With this in mind, I argue that demography had a strong influence on the lives of Diego López and Juan Correa. In Mexico City, the indigenous population declined to only around 32,000 by the late sixteenth century. Even with the additional devastating food shortages, droughts, and epidemics in the eighteenth century, Mexico City had 150,000 residents in 1800, rivaling important European cities in its number of residents—further evidence that it functioned as a core urban center for Spanish colonialism, a focus of economic, political, and cultural energy in the Americas.20 Although it is very difficult to precisely ascertain the origins of Mexico City’s population over time, approximately 30 percent of the population throughout the colonial era was descended from Native peoples, with individuals of African and Spanish ancestry making up

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the remaining 70 percent. As time passed, a greater number of Mexico City locals claimed European descent. Census takers in the late eighteenth century reported that they constituted almost 50 percent of the residents.21 Cartagena had strategic importance for Spanish maritime trade and naval defenses, but it seems like a tiny backwater compared to New Spain’s viceregal seat. The indigenous population living near Cartagena experienced nearly total annihilation shortly after the conquest because of new diseases thriving in the tropical climate. Only a few hundred colonial Indian subjects lived in Cartagena at any given time, and in 1684 the city’s total population consisted of only 7,341 residents, with slaves adding at least another 25 percent to that number. African slaves passing through the port for sale in the gold mines to the west or inland contributed to the city’s large transient population. In fact, throughout the colonial era, African slaves and their racially mixed, free, or enslaved descendants numerically dominated the region. Cartagena had a population of barely 20,000 by the independence era, a fraction of Mexico City’s number of residents. Not counting transient men, racially mixed and enslaved women outnumbered other groups in the population.22 How did these demographic differences affect the lives of Juan Correa and Diego López? Each of these men had access to different social networks and levels of economic and social mobility, in part because of the different possibilities provided by Mexico City and Cartagena. Mexico City, like any large metropolis, offered appreciably more opportunities for ambitious, lucky, and well-connected individuals trying to make their fortune. Tapping into family connections and a dense web of civil and religious bureaucrats helped Correa achieve his impressive career success. López, in contrast, did not have access to an effective support network—his social connections instead led him to torture in the Holy Office’s secret prisons and humiliation in an autoda-fé on Cartagena’s streets. Correa had two things that López lacked: parental support that opened the doors of opportunity, and an urban environment that allowed for an astonishing degree of upward mobility for its Afrodescended residents.23 Juan Correa Sr. and Pascuala de Santoyo provided their son with the patronage networks, wealth, and training he needed to rise to prominence as a painter, including setting him up as an apprentice to a renowned master, Antonio Rodríguez.24 Juan Correa’s career flourished as he carefully cultivated

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his profuse connections to the Spanish elite, earning numerous commissions from religious institutions extending to the far reaches of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, including Guatemala. He also associated with some very wealthy people of African descent in his strong community of upwardly mobile castas (mixed-race individuals).25 Correa’s well-connected mother and her six children offer impressive examples of upward economic and social mobility.26 Descent from slaves and even illegitimate birth did not stop them from finding a bright spot within the city’s baroque tapestry. One of Pascuala’s illegitimate sons became a Franciscan friar, and her daughter was a nun in the Santa Isabel friary, where Pascuala was eventually buried, in a dignified display of posthumous baroque piety.27 Correa’s social and familial ties helped buffer him from any blocks he may have faced in his rise to prominence as a prolific master painter, although like other leading painters in Mexico City, he faced the uncertainty of the status of painting and whether it was or was not a liberal art.28 Regardless, Correa seems to have never faced the crises endured by López and the desperate acts that followed. In contrast to Correa, López shouldered the burden of freedman status in a locale that was more of a slave society than, as in the case of Mexico City, a society with slaves.29 This difference in population makeup and economic focus led to the more extreme social and hierarchical rigidity, and indeed the outright fear of Afro-descended individuals, that López experienced in the Caribbean port. In Cartagena the military had a more prominent presence than in Mexico City. Although Cartagena had some of the same bureaucratic structures as Mexico City, instead of a viceroy or an audiencia (superior court) the most important local authorities were the governor (with significant military functions) and his appointed lieutenant general. One reason for this difference was Cartagena’s strategic location. It was known as the “key to the Indies” because of its superb natural port and its maritime accessibility to several important Caribbean cities, including Veracruz, Panama City, and Havana.30 The town’s physical structure expressed its fears of pirate attacks and threats to Spanish naval domination, but it also hosted the basic minimum of churches, convents, and colleges. For its size Cartagena was well served by hospitals, generally catering to transient seamen. Like Mexico City, Cartagena was the site of specialized medical research, and López benefited from

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the city’s recognized need for charitable hospitals, where he could find employment even as a slave. Unlike Correa, López lived in a place and a time in which Spanish authorities feared the increasing numbers of slaves and free people of color in their locale as serious threats to society. As a result López left a record of a desperate man lacking helpful patrons, mentors, or family but with a complicated private life and many occupational competitors. One of these, a freedwoman herbalist and love-magic practitioner named Paula de Eguiluz, named López as a participant in witches’ gatherings. Whether these gatherings actually took place is not known; however, he was sexually involved with Afrodescended women accused of witchcraft. These women made up López’s social milieu, in contrast to Correa’s male-dominated group of upwardly mobile mulatto tradesmen and professionals. López tried to redirect the inquisitors’ attention from himself by making accusations against other local healers of various kinds. López repeated fabulous tales of Paula’s sexual activity, her jealousy of rivals, her desire for vengeance, her knowledge of poison and other maleficio (evil spells), and, worst of all, her proselytization of other women, including Spanish doñas. López also attacked a fellow surgeon called Martín Sánchez, whom he accused of Protestant words and acts, even though the two men were previously close friends. Finally, López ruined the life another surgeon called Blas de Paz Pinto by tapping into deep-seated Spanish fears of crypto-Judaism and Portuguese rebellion that were coming to a climax in Iberia in the 1630s. López’s malicious testimonies helped transfer the inquisitors’ focus to the local Portuguese Jewish population, leading to a prolonged, violent, economically destructive persecution. All three malevolent caricatures (African woman, Protestant, and scheming Portuguese Jew) were especially threatening to the authorities in Cartagena, who for good reason worried about attacks from Spain’s imperial competitors.

Local Religion In this section I speculate on individual interpretations of or reactions to religious regionalism or local religion, moving beyond the more obvious hypotheses that regionalism emerges from how humans interact with a given geographic setting, as manifested in demography and economic development.

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Whereas López’s faith seemed wracked by fear and finger-pointing, Correa spent a lifetime creating beautiful baroque images celebrating, most often, the Virgin of Guadalupe. Their contrasting experiences present a possible avenue for imaginative conjectures about their own personal understanding of local religion. In the seventeenth century and beyond, miraculous images, shrines, and living local saints defined local landscapes and history, underscoring the complexity of regional identity and the enduring strength of the local spiritual landscape.31 Correa may have been one of the seventeenth-century’s most successful painters of Guadalupe; his life’s work provided an important boost for this image’s eventual preeminence, along with encouraging the broader emphasis on visual understanding of numerous other saints, including local American saints, such as Rose of Lima.32 Correa’s paintings indicate that he both celebrated and benefited from this kind of pious expression. It offered him countless opportunities to earn money, practice his artistry, and build his reputation. He may have viewed his home city and the region around it as a sacred landscape full of architectural spaces that demanded visual representation of Guadalupe and other Catholic devotions. His personal religiosity could be characterized as a productive and creative piety, moving from depicting local religion to promoting international devotions globally. In terms of local religion, López’s life coincided precisely with two important Spanish reactions to African-influenced beliefs and practices. First, as a teenager, López must have known that the Spanish Inquisition’s tribunal came to Cartagena in the wake of fears of a growing influence of indigenous rituals and, most important for its broader Caribbean jurisdiction, African rituals, viewed as devilish and idolatrous. From 1610 through the 1620s, the inquisitors gradually targeted more and more Afro-descended women for these crimes against the faith, and this peaked with his own experience with the Holy Office.33 Second, López lived through the growing miraculous and self-sacrificing reputation of the Cartagena saint Peter Claver (d. 1654), known as the “slave of the slaves” for his efforts to catechize Africans arriving in the port. In effect Claver’s constant struggles to turn Africans into Catholics brought to vivid life the idea of Cartagena as a battlefield against religious enemies. Claver personally charged into parties in the city streets and plazas “like an

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enraged bull,” scattering the dancers, who dropped their large, heavy drums and fled from the saint, who was wielding both a whip and bronze crucifix.34 Saint Peter might have even seen the “malignant spirits who incited these blacks in these dances.” 35 López tapped into these fears as he luridly depicted the looming specters of brujería (witchcraft), Judaism, and Protestantism in his scatological testimonies. How local saints, images, and miracle workers functioned within their two societies suggests the personal meanings of regional difference for these two men, with Correa enjoying a lavish baroque setting and López caught in a slave society that battled real and imagined threats on all sides. In terms of López’s personal religiosity, my reading of his graphic testimonies makes me believe that he felt guilty for actions that he feared the inquisitors considered sins and that he also had a deeper personal remorse for things he had done that he knew were wrong. His stated morality implies that he constantly endured a losing internal battle, surrendering often to temptation. Claver also felt this impossible struggle, as he hopelessly tried to suppress the ever growing African culture in Cartagena. In contrast, the only surviving insight into Correa’s perspective on sexuality and Catholic morality is his opulent painting entitled La Conversión de María Magdalena. On one side the penitent Magdalene sits sadly in a beautifully appointed room, dressed in a richly embroidered gown with diaphanous sleeves. She has ripped off her pearl necklace, and it has fallen to the ground among other jewels strewn about on her dressing table and spilling out of chests, finery, and instruments. She turns away in distress from both her mirror and an image of her lover. On the other side, her face relaxes as she stares at a skull in a cave, surrounded by a fantastic flower garden, reminiscent of Rose of Lima’s iconography. In this painting Correa—living in central Mexico, where it seemed that the Virgin of Guadalupe and other Marian devotions triumphed—has celebrated success over the temptations of the flesh, emotions, and wealth; moral self-control will lead to happiness. Both Correa and López make documented gestures shoring up their embrace of conventional morality, but the painter Correa does it peacefully through his graceful images, whereas the surgeon López reveals losing inner battles through his bitter inquisitorial confessions. Perhaps the regional difference both men experienced as a result of their surrounding local religion affected these individual expressions. This contrasting experience suggests

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that regional difference can touch individuals deeply, even to the heart of their understanding of the world around them and their own inner worlds.

Regionalism’s Continuing Legacies When assessing Diego López and Juan Correa’s very different fates, do available archival sources influence our interpretation of these two men’s lives? Researchers should ask themselves how their sources create their perspectives on their topics. In the process of researching the documentary record of Spanish rule in the Americas, historians quickly perceive the complexity of overlapping jurisdictions controlled by a variety of secular and clerical courts and bureaucracies. What archival sources remain available function as an important aspect of regional difference for any historian working on Spanish America, and thus we must ask how regionalism shapes which topics we can choose and how we can pursue them. Because of regionalism’s continuing legacies, we must submit to the regional variation that continues to exist in the archival record. Because only Inquisition case summaries record López’s life story, we see him only in a defensive stance. In contrast, Mexico City’s notarial archive allows historians to re-create Correa’s social and familial network in great detail. Correa’s paintings also provide an in-depth panorama of his professional life, although their baroque style does not allow for psychological insights in the way that more recent works of art might. But López’s confessions open quite an intriguing window into the surgeon’s mental world. It is possible that if Cartagena’s notarial records had survived, López’s life might appear very different. Outside the realm of speculation, López’s social ties clearly brought him very little in the way of Correa’s prosperity, stability, and respectable status. An understanding of regional archives (what remains and what institutions generated them) will play an important role in how any historian shapes his or her project. Every research project requires its own questions on how location affects historical actors and what records can shape new scholarship. However, every good research project must determine a few essentials when it comes to regional difference, rather than simply understanding the geographic location and how it influenced those who lived there. A new project should always start with an inspiration from a document or a secondary source

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pointing to an intriguing place, institution, individual, belief, practice, activity, or any other recordable human experience. For me, the interactions of Afro-descended individuals, such as Diego López and Juan Correa, with the colonial bureaucracy offer a fantastic window into the functioning of Spanish laws and religion in the New World and how they affected any given man or woman’s choices and perspectives throughout his or her life. Although I have favored an imaginative interpretation here, I cannot take Correa and López out of their historical context or narrate nondocumented accounts of their lives. As historians, we must all find tangible, written ways to research the people, events, and attitudes that fascinate us, so we have to think about where, when, and who might have carried out some documented expression of what draws our interest and curiosity. Most essentially for Latin America, did some bureaucrat record the belief or occurrence? In general, we need to ask where this human experience took place. Who did it? And above all, did anyone record it in written form? In Cartagena, López endured ups and downs that offer a striking contrast to Correa’s remarkable rise out of a supportive, prosperous family in Mexico City to international acclaim. He is a beloved painter to this day. Although this juxtaposition of the life stories of two free men of color has artificially deemphasized how personal choice and individual character shaped their lives, there can be no doubt that Cartagena’s vulnerable strategic geographic position and heavily enslaved population fostered an official fear of both internal and external enemies. In my interpretation here, López’s selfpresentation in his inquisitorial investigation mirrors these insecurities, for his testimony creates dangerous adversaries everywhere, even within himself. Correa, on the other hand, carefully followed the path of Church, state, and family patronage as he successfully worked his way through Mexico City’s baroque labyrinth, including his effort to professionalize the standards of the painters’ guild.36 Even the most cursory glance at his parents’ successes shows that Correa had excellent guides. Unfortunately, regional archival deficiencies prevent us from learning about López’s parents, but the basic fact that many of Cartagena’s residents just passed through the port on their way to somewhere else, in contrast to Mexico City, which was a place to settle and tap into great wealth and opportunities, provides a final example of how regionalism affected the lives of these two men. If we choose to interpret regional difference beyond the basic facts of physical geography and the

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human use of it, we can perhaps turn to more hypothetical realms, such as individuals’ spiritual, mental, and emotional geography, deepening our understanding of the complexity of colonial Latin American history.

Notes 1. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 2. Davis, Return, 5. 3. Eric Van Young, Writing Mexican History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 167–97. 4. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 55. 5. Van Young, Writing, 168–69. 6. Lesley Bird Simpson, Many Mexicos, 4th ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1–11. 7. Van Young, Writing, 182. 8. William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), 3–4. 9. Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003). 10. James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 11. Ibid., 57. 12. Ibid., 36, 59. 13. Most, but not all, of Diego López’s case has survived in a fifty-two page summary sent to Spain in 1634. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Inquisición, 1620, exp. 7, Proceso de fe de Diego López. 14. María Cristina Navarette, Practicas religiosas de los negros en la colonia: Cartagena, siglo XVII (Cali, Colombia: Universidad del Valle, 1995), 115–17. 15. Elisa Vargas Lugo and Gustavo Curiel, Juan Correa: Su vida y obra (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1991), vol. 2. Documents relating to Juan Correa Sr.’s limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) investigation are on pages 31–42. See also María Elisa Velasquez Gutiérrez, Juan Correa, “mulato libre, maestro de pintor” (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1998), 16–22. 16. Elisa Vargas Lugo, “Juan Correa,” in El arte en tiempos de Juan Correa, ed. María del Consuelo Maquívar (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1994), 176. 17. Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, “El gremio y la cofradía de pintores en la Nueva España,”

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19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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in Velasquez Gutiérrez, Juan Correa, 215. See also Susan Deans-Smith, “‘Dishonor in the Hands of Indians, Spaniards, and Blacks’: The (Racial) Politics of Painting,” in Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America, ed. Ilona Katzew and Susan Deans-Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 46–48, 59–61, 68. For the baroque era and its representations, see Kenneth Mills and Evonne Levy, Lexicon of the Hispanic American Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). Martha Fernández, “La Ciudad de México en el siglo XVII,” in Maquívar, El arte, 21–36. Matthew O’Hara, A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749– 1857 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 19–24, 244n18; R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 9–14. Nicole von Germeten, “Black Brotherhoods in Mexico City,” in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, ed. Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs, and James Sidbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 249; Michael Scardaville, “Crime and the Urban Poor: Mexico City in the late Colonial Period,” PhD dissertation, University of Florida, Gainesville, 1977. Adolfo Meisel Roca and María Aguilera Díaz, “Cartagena de Indias en 1777: Un análisis demográfico,” in Boletín cultural y bibliográfico 34, no. 45 (1997): 21-57. This article has been republished as a book, Tres siglos de la historia demográfica de Cartagena de Indias (Bogotá, Colombia: Banco de la República, 2009). See also Linda L. Greenow, Family, Household, and Home: A Micro-Geographic Analysis of Cartagena (New Granada) in 1777 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Department of Geography, 1976), 7, 25–26, 29–30. For Juan Correa Sr.’s experiences, see Vargas Lugo and Curiel, Juan Correa, 32, and Vargas Lugo, “Juan Correa,” 173–74. Vargas Lugo and Curiel, Juan Correa, 177–78. Ibid., 45, 57, 64–65, 70. For a detailed study of Mexico City’s patronage system as it affected nonwhites, see Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 164. Vargas Lugo and Curiel, Juan Correa, 47–48, 56. Deans-Smith, “Dishonor in the Hands,” 57–68. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 10. Nicolás del Castillo Mathieu, La llave de las Indias (Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones El Tiempo, 1981). Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images, 65. Maquívar, El arte en tiempos, plate 15. Nicole von Germeten, Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, and Honor in

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Colonial Cartagena de Indias (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 31, 53, 103–43. 34. Ana María Splendiani and Tulio Aristizábal, Proceso de beatificación y canonización de San Pedro Claver (Bogotá, Colombia: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2002), 190–91. 35. Ibid., 193. See also Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery, ed. and trans. Nicole von Germeten (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008), 155. 36. Deans-Smith, “Dishonor in the Hands,” 59–61.

Chapter 4

Moving across Disciplines

Context, T heory, and Colonial Sources



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This chapter will illustrate how someone who thinks contextually and approaches historical sources from the perspective of literary studies addresses disciplinary boundaries. At the same time it will try to demonstrate that the study of Spanish colonialism is necessary for an understanding of the present. This line of work is inevitably impure, or hybrid. As someone trained in literature but specializing in the colonial period, I constantly turn to historians’ crucial contributions to better understand the texts I study. Likewise, theory is essential to my analyses because it provides the frameworks and the ideas that allow us to see the larger trends and paradigms in which our subjects of study often participated—and, just as happens to us, most of the time without their knowing it. As I hope to demonstrate, interesting possibilities emerge from theoretically informed close readings of historical sources. Close reading can be considered an exercise similar to doing a jigsaw puzzle, although in a sense it proceeds in reverse. The first step involves disassembling a text by looking at the logic behind every paragraph and every chapter and its relation to the whole until one finds, as it were, its core: the series of ideas, or relationships, that make it what it is. Once this is achieved, one can proceed to assemble it anew, to find what even the author might not have known. As social constructs, words take us to places an author could not have foreseen. While you read this, for example, you are thinking not only about what these words mean but also why I’m saying them and what

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my point is. Some of you might discover in them meanings that I never intended but that are nevertheless here for a good reader to notice. As for theory, one should think about it not as something one applies to a text but as a complement to history. Parallel readings of theory-history or theory-literature illuminate each other: philosophers and critics who think conceptually—what is capitalism, what is an episteme, what is technology, and so forth—and historians have much to say to each other. Our role is to make these conversations possible. Many philosophers or theorists have written about phenomena pertinent to the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and their abstract notions can be fruitfully put in dialogue with the minute details of historical works. Theory acquires a body through this exercise, and history discloses its historicity: what a period was, what matters about certain events, and why. In other words, theory shows us why history is not an undifferentiated continuum in which events pile on top of one another in a monotonous way but is, on the contrary, a reality full of difference. The first section of this chapter offers an example of how to read absences, contradictions, tensions, and displacements. It is based on a close reading of different texts to show how textuality creates meanings beyond the information it conveys and how these meanings can be read in tandem with the layers of data each text provides. The examples come from my own work on the Jesuits to prove that whether willingly or not, religious men were hard at work on behalf of nonreligious goals and that during the sixteenth century some of the order’s most interesting thinkers wrote texts that created a separation between tradition and the emergent practices. The second section explores how theory contributes to the study of the past and opens up new perspectives into it. I do this by contrasting what Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, wrote about the seventeenth century to the way in which Anthony Grafton, one of the leading scholars of the early modern period, has read the legitimacy and/or advisability of some recent approaches to the materials of that age.

Close Readings: What Did Not Make It into the Jesuits’ Official Accounts Because they engage in discussions about very specific problems and situations, intelligent writers, as most Jesuits were, deliberately construct their

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texts with certain goals in mind, even if they end up not reaching them, or if midway they start to do something else without realizing it. To show both this deliberateness and its foibles—specifically the Jesuits’ use of different strategies to create a particular image of themselves and their endeavors and what these tactics reveal instead—I will refer to José de Acosta’s De procuranda indorum salute (1588) and official chronicles and private letters penned by eighteenth-century Jesuits living in New Spain’s borderlands.1 Although literature and historical documents do not attempt to do the same, the reading practices of literary critics are helpful in producing interpretations that look beyond the information documents present. Even when a document expounds historical facts, something it wants to present as truthful, truth is not transparent or automatically available. On the contrary, truth has to be created, and in the cases I present here, the writers do it either by rhetorical means (Acosta) or by omitting any information that would go against the image of their missions the Jesuits wanted to create (the Jesuit letter writers). Acosta writes with the debate about Spain’s right to possess the Indies in mind—he is, in fact, hoping to have the final word on the polemic initiated by Bartolomé de las Casas and Ginés de Sepúlveda in the mid-sixteenth century.2 According to Acosta, just as had happened in many other instances of conquest, whether legal or not, time had conferred a legal status to the de facto situation of the Indies.3 Nevertheless, to therefore put an end to the chaotic state still prevailing in the colonies, he advanced an overarching project to reform the exploitation of the Americas in the name of evangelization. Acosta’s book served as the theoretical and practical guide for the Jesuits’ global missions, and its difficulty demands careful attention to how it is constructed. Here we will focus on the fact that in De procuranda there are multiple statements that appear to be contradictions: what Acosta says in one chapter (e.g., violence was necessary when dealing with “savage” groups) is rejected in another (e.g., violence was never acceptable).4 Among the disparities, one is fundamental: the split between Acosta’s stated objectives— evangelization and God’s glory—and the means through which, of his own accord, these objectives should be met: colonial expansion and economic exploitation. For example, after spending several chapters describing the dangers and

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horrors of mining, he nevertheless concludes that if the mines were abandoned, “then all will be lost: any progress and public organization of the Indians will crumble to the ground.” 5 A statement such as this, accepting the necessity of dire conditions, brings all former contradictions into perspective: it erases Acosta’s denunciation of violence to make this other violence the condition for the possibility of evangelization. That is, this statement does not have the same value as all others in De procuranda, and as readers we have to be ready to recognize when an element abruptly changes the rules of the game, as this sentence does. Thus, in order to establish a more legitimate relationship with the Americas, Acosta (1) acknowledges the violence of the conquest but displaces it to the past—time had turned a de facto situation into a legal one, and (2) subtly accepts the economic exploitation of the Indians. In the next section I will return to Acosta, but here I conclude by saying that once we have taken apart the pieces of Acosta’s puzzle (what he is saying in one chapter and what in another) we have to reconstruct it anew. For this it was first necessary to find the ideas around which his project (evangelization) is made possible and makes sense. In this case, in order to explain his contradictions we arrive at the convergence between economic exploitation and Christianity, which the American colonies launched and De procuranda foregrounds. In contrast, in the Jesuits’ firmly established eighteenth-century global network of letters, information, and commodities, there is a structural split that one might say is constitutive of the Jesuits’ writings of the time. Published historical and ethnographic works on the borderlands excluded essential information that, according to the Jesuits’ more private communications, gave each local place its particular character. The disparities, visible in the differences between what the same Jesuit writes in official and nonofficial documents, reveal the distilling process by which the public version of a place was carefully constructed. If one follows the thread of letters among the different parties involved— Jesuits in the missions, their superiors in Madrid or Mexico City, and their families somewhere in Europe—and compares them with the official books these same Jesuits wrote, one will find the disjointed layers of writing by which fear and despair are communicated, decisions made, information selected and then edited out, failures censored, and so on. For these more private documents, close reading remains essential because it is through the

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repetition of certain elements in the Jesuits’ internal documents that one can see what they thought of the missions, the indigenous populations, and the regions in which they were stationed. The evident discrepancies between these letters and the historical accounts the Jesuits wrote force us to question the seemingly clear picture expounded in the final product. This in turn helps us consider how final versions are constructed in history: Where does the truth of the missions lie—in the orderly chronicles the Jesuits published or in the often (at least in the case of the borderlands where the missions were located) distraught letters they wrote complaining of their difficult situations? In the case of El Nayar, one of the last regions to be conquered in western New Spain (1722), José Ortega wrote a history of this difficult conquest, which, considering previous failed attempts, was a major military and religious feat.6 This achievement is nevertheless belied by the communications among Jesuits in the province and with their superiors in Mexico City.7 It is telling that the official history of this province, in which everything appeared calm and the Indians’ rejection of Christianity was supposedly a thing of the past, was written while most of the Jesuits in El Nayar had little faith in achieving much of anything among the inhabitants of the area because of what they considered the widespread continuation of the Indians’ idolatrous practices. The situation could be summed up by something similar to what Jacob Baegert, a Jesuit working in Baja California Sur, stated in a letter to his brother (who was also a Jesuit) to explain his despair at his order’s meager religious accomplishments among the Waikuri Indians: “Even if they’re going to die, you cannot tell from their outward behaviour that they are better prepared for confession. For God’s sake, I wish I am mistaken, but this is my opinion! I can imagine that it is of no comfort for Your Reverence to read these things, how hard it must be to experience them yourself, and how sad to see them with your own eyes!” 8 This brings us to what for me proves that even though the Jesuits thought they were serving one purpose, they were indeed doing something else. Like Baegert and the Jesuits in El Nayar, the majority of the missionaries in these three regions doubted the conversion of the Indians to Christianity; that is, they did not believe they had achieved their main objective or that they were anywhere closer to doing so. Nevertheless, in spite of the unlikelihood that

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their efforts would succeed, they remained in the missions they had been assigned to, often for many years. The ideas that the Jesuits may have had about life and work in the missions were, according to Baegert, painfully betrayed once they arrived at their posts. There they had to confront their innocence at having imagined they would found towns, raise cattle, practice agriculture, and, more important, have a Christian flock that would attend Mass at least properly dressed. The reality was very different, and often none of this was possible.9 Although it could nonetheless be argued that their activities served God, Baegert seemed to doubt this, as did Philipp Segesser, a Jesuit working in Sonora, who was baffled by the mundane character of everyday duties that left him little time for anything he could consider spiritual: Besides spiritual duties the missionary has continually to take care of worldly business which he by no means dare neglect. . . . Where there is no bread the children do not appear. Therefore, the missionary must above all things provide meals, for then the Indians gather around and then he can achieve the desired results with them. Providing food for the Indians seems very laborious to many fathers for they had an entirely different view of things when they left their beloved province to devote themselves to missionary work. That is the way it was with me. I well remember what was said to me and to others by the father provincial when I made a request to be sent to the missions. His words were: Nescitis quid petatis [You know not what you ask]. I experienced it! It happens that I left my paternal hearth to enter a spiritual station principally because I saw that business and agriculture were not for me, but in this mission I encountered much more of that sort of anxiety than I would ever have had in my fatherland. . . . Thus it remains little time to the father missionary for the performance of his spiritual labors (unless we wish to say that the entire day is spent in spiritual business, even though it may be temporal).10 Like Baegert, who challenged his brother to face the uncomfortable reality of the failure to convert the Indians, Segesser shares his qualms with his family, to whom the letter is addressed. Even though he had entered the Jesuit order in pursuit of noncommercial affairs, being a Jesuit had forced him to do

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exactly what he wanted to avoid. Spirituality and trite economic pursuits were entangled in a way that made it difficult for him to differentiate them. At first sight it seemed to him that spirituality and even God were receding from his mission, but upon further thought he concedes, albeit without conviction, that it could be that religiosity had to be found precisely in those mundane economic pursuits. Regardless of the interpretation the Jesuits wished to provide for this, if we engage in a close reading and discussion of texts similar to the ones I’ve introduced here, we’ll realize that it is not the whim of twenty-first-century critics that questions the possibility of finding God or of doing God’s work while immersed in commercial and economic transactions, as if God could be found only in a solitary cell or a cave removed from the world—which is, in fact, what the Jesuit ethos was against, as seen in the maxim put forward by Jerónimo Nadal, one of the first generals of the order: “The world is our home.” 11 But even though the Jesuit order was founded on the decision to leave behind the cloister to find God in the world, it is the skepticism and doubts of the Jesuits themselves that allow us to question their working ad maiorem Dei gloriam (“for the greater glory of God,” the Jesuits’ motto)—unless, that is, God’s glory lay in the expansion of an economic and civilizing system, an endeavor in which the Jesuits were indeed proving successful. The disparity between means (commercial exploits, in Acosta’s case or in Sonora) and end (Christianity), as well as between objective (evangelization) and results (economic success, the writing of history) is not exclusive to the Jesuits. Every institution runs the risk of permitting the accidents and/or the means to take center stage and displace its purported objectives. If eighteenth-century Jesuits in New Spain’s borderlands acknowledged that they were not achieving much in the way of converting indigenous people to Christianity, or in being able to find spirituality in their everyday activities (the examples I gave are representative of many others), it is fair to ask what these Jesuit missions stood for. In the eighteenth century the Jesuits disciplined themselves in order to present an optimistic public face and leave the problems that gave shape to their everyday life among indigenous people for internal consultation. God and religion seemed to hang by a thread from projects that, according to the Jesuits, appeared to disprove religion itself: mining, for Acosta; commercial

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pursuits, for Segesser; and unimpressed and unconvinced Indians, for Baegert. Whether or not they openly acknowledged it, the Jesuits seemed to have known, yet they pressed on. Superiors’ commands, duty, and the simple habits of everyday life forced them to go on even when they were engaged in mundane, secular pursuits that had no resemblance to what they had imagined for their evangelizing mission.

A Theoretical Framework: How to Read Tradition and Change In the following pages I will put Anthony Grafton, one of the most interesting historians of Europe’s early modern period, in dialogue with Michel Foucault, the philosopher who can be credited with excavating sources in order to unearth the origins of who we are as a modern society. Whereas for Grafton the analyses of Acosta should always connect him to the previous European traditions he belonged to, for Foucault Spain was at the center of the experiences that left behind those traditions and brought about the modern world. To this I will add what literature and art history contribute to the recognition of important historical breaks: the positing of a rift internal to the subject (how people saw themselves in relation to the world they lived in) that parallels the rupture the New World represented for European knowledge. In a review of some of the new scholarship on the New World, Grafton called it revisionist and stated that it “suffer[s] from an inattention to the European context of what are, after all, European historical texts.” 12 Years later, referring again to some of these new writers (he included Walter Mignolo and the not-so-new work of Edmundo O’Gorman on Acosta), Grafton offered what for me constitutes the core of his uneasiness with the projects he assessed: “Yet these studies, for all their merits, do not do much to insert Acosta’s book [Historia moral and natural] and others like it into one of the contexts that shaped their form and content: the development of European historiography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” 13 Grafton devoted this essay to correcting the oversight. The result is a José de Acosta who does little that can be considered new and is simply a good example of the European humanistic tradition.14 Yet as someone who has written on Acosta and claims to know him, I think that, as I have been proposing here, it would be fair to say that it is precisely the work of this Jesuit priest (and others) that allows colonial

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specialists to suggest that the Hispanic colonial era functions as a hinge of sorts. It’s Janus-faced, and if it draws connections between itself and the medieval period or the Renaissance (as Grafton argued), it also allows us to see a rupture with these epochs as well as the new beginnings it brought about. Since Acosta was very well-read and followed by his contemporaries and the succeeding generations, his work is important for an understanding of a whole range of problems related to modern empires and colonialism. I don’t think that revisionist works are interested in removing Acosta, or other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers, from their proper place, but they do want to show how some of them simultaneously belong to paradigms they in fact helped create. In order to do that they have accentuated the element in Acosta that Grafton himself recognized; after all, he closed his later essay with the following: “The point of the new history that Acosta wrote was to lay down foundations for what would genuinely be a new world: . . . Like many historians of his time . . . Acosta, as he recreated the past, looked forward to a radically different future.” That radically different future, in which the energy, skills, and intelligence of the Indians would be “turned to new purposes,” is precisely the focus of researchers who are trying to offer another, equally valid perspective.15 That is why reading New World materials in tandem with those on general European developments (theory) clarifies the role the colonies played in the transformations of the early modern world. In the rest of this chapter I want to show some of the themes and areas that can be pursued. Acosta was writing when the impact of events such as the “discovery” of the New World, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation were changing the way the world was understood. Perhaps, as Grafton has argued, this occurred not all of a sudden, but through seminal texts such as those of Acosta, widely read in their time and beyond, in which there are clear rifts with the tradition they belonged to, as manifested in “Acosta’s laughter” at Aristotle’s mistakes when Acosta saw that contrary to what the Greek philosopher had said, life was possible in the torrid zone.16 To add to the surprise, one could even be cold there, an amused Acosta reported.17 This distance from what others had previously said, or from what others were saying about current polemical events, acquires another dimension when seen from the perspective of what was happening in the Americas,

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where in several ways words and reality did not seem to match, as Acosta and many others insisted. Foucault has referred to this sixteenth- and seventeenth-century phenomenon as the rupture between words and things, the opening up of a space between what was read and reality.18 And if one reads Foucault (and other critics) along with colonial texts, one can see new possibilities for research and teaching, new ways of looking at old texts. The rupture between words and things that Foucault read in a Spanish literary work (El Quijote) and that according to him made possible the creation of worlds that followed a text—that is, it allowed for the creation of artificial worlds—can be seen in Acosta’s pages. First, we can see it in the rift between what Acosta had read in Aristotle about the torrid zone and what he found once he was in that zone, and it is also evident in Bartolomé de las Casas’s texts that point out the painful rupture between law and reality in the Indies. No doubt some of these works were not only pointing to the incongruity but also trying to bridge it, with very different degrees of success. Some of them created instead the texts that would proceed to “invent” a new place out of the given.19 It is in this vein that the project of De procuranda should be interpreted: it is a text that serves as a guide, of sorts, to reality. The second area in which continuity and rupture were crucial is related to subjectivity—that is, to the people who were at the center of these changes and these pressures. As has long been recognized in the field of literary studies, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there occurred another break, this time of the subject with him- or herself. The work of Baltasar Gracián, another Jesuit, is one of the most interesting sources that shows how naïve it would be to consider that people in the seventeenth century were capable of saying or willing to say exactly what they wanted and how flawed it would be to think that they were (and we are) fully invested in what they said.20 Whether the social constraints of Counter-Reformation Spain made it more difficult for its people to say what they could or wanted to, or people chose to hide under many possible masks and theatrical roles in order to achieve selfmastery and manipulate others or simply to survive at a difficult time, hardly anyone could afford to speak clearly and directly or to openly be whatever they thought they were.21 As Gracián (even if he is a too interested and cunning model) put it, in seventeenth century Spain it was necessary to “without lying, not to say all the truth.” He claimed this was necessary because “there

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isn’t anything that requires more caution than truth, which is a bleeding of the heart.” 22 However, it has been established that he did it in the name of self-interest and power, although the reasons for caution were multiple and his are only examples.23 The internal tearing apart of subjects who said one thing and meant another is precisely what many literary and artistic works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries problematize and stage. So-called baroque paintings, for example, present us with portraits in which it appears that “mental impulses are far from completely controlling the impulses of the body” because “the two elements, mind and body, have, as it were, parted company. It is as if these men no longer have full power over their own bodies, no longer permeate them with their own will.” 24 That is, baroque art showed how antagonistic forces could merge in the same subject. When explaining the possibility that viewers might dislike how some baroque portraits represent people who not only feel but also know that they’re feeling (which impedes the sentiment from fully taking them over), Erwin Panofsky said, “Only we should not forget that this psychological rift is the logical consequence of the historical situation [the pressures of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation], and at the same time the very foundation of what we call the ‘modern’ form of imagination and thought.” 25 After all, it is this duplicity of the early modern period (and of the Jesuits in particular) that bothered Enlightenment thinkers who tried to remedy this situation and find a language in which saying X would finally mean X and only X.26 The necessary hyperawareness of the social and religious norms of the time does not mean that people in seventeenth-century Spain were particularly insincere; it means they were something a lot more complex and interesting. Awareness of the norms and of people’s relation to them produces a possible space for dissent, but it could also provide a sense of the codes and names, the available frameworks to speak from what was proper in their particular society.27 Yet this awareness did not guarantee full control. As we saw in the previous section, the ensuing slippages open the door to questions about what people meant when they professed their allegiance to the Church, God, or the Crown. These might have become the expected placeholders for something else. They allow, therefore, for a questioning of the absolute parity between a

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word or concept and what it supposedly names. This makes it possible to inquire about what ad maiorem Dei gloriam could have meant for some of the Jesuits who consigned their activities under this motto. This probing comes not from a particular malice toward the Jesuits but from the fact that we, as scholars, can never expect our subjects of inquiry to give an account of themselves that we then replicate in our interpretations. We cannot expect power and institutions where power is negotiated and affirmed to impartially explain themselves. There may be instances in which what an institution says about itself (e.g., “we do it for the good of the people, to improve their lives”) coincides with what the researcher finds, but it may be otherwise. Selfrepresentation might be wrong or deceptive. Furthermore, even when people and institutions do what they do for the reasons they give (e.g., ad maiorem Dei gloriam), the results of those actions may take them to areas that belie their initial intentions. This is why it is possible to conclude that in spite of what Acosta said (with which Grafton agreed: “his History . . . would contribute both to the rightful praise of God’s glory and to the expansion of Christianity among the Indians”), he can be read differently if one takes into account what he conceded in the pursuit of God’s glory.28 Once this influential Jesuit (and many others after him) accepted that economic exploitation was the very foundation of evangelization, God’s glory was inevitably tarnished or converted into something else. It became a possible by-product of dismal forms of economic expansion. From then on, the history of Christianity as a global religion would be intertwined with and dependent on the economic forces that eventually became what we know as capitalism. This history could have taken a different form, no doubt, but it didn’t. And this future is what some historians and literary critics are contending with.

Conclusion In terms of disciplines, the analyses we have pursued here are a hybrid of sorts, but only to a certain point. If, on the one hand, we combined genres normally considered historical (e.g., letters and cartas anuas [annual letters]) with literary works and theory, on the other, we did not read them only as sources of information. Texts may point to meanings different from those explicitly stated by their authors. If faithful to history as a discipline of

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relentless contextualization, close reading and literary theory can point beyond the way things were and make visible, for example, an until-then unrecognized gap between what a person has written and what he or she has actually said. When we read De procuranda we have to contend with its multiple contradictions and constant instability. Yet a text such as this one, which puts forward a thorough program of reform, cannot remain forever unstable; it has to be grounded in something in order to advance its proposals. That foundation is precisely the economic exploitation (regardless of its brutal nature) that guarantees evangelization. Perhaps such a basis, as necessary as it might have been, was so unacceptable even to Acosta that he had to bury it in confusing chapters that state one thing and then the opposite. In the eighteenth-century borderlands, the image emerging from this mixed methodology allows one to recognize, in the case of the Jesuits, the difficulties of lives spent in extreme solitude (Baegert) and the contradictions of religious vocations squandered in commercial and bureaucratic endeavors (Segesser). This is not to say that religion or religiosity had ceased to exist in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries but to indicate how, like everything else, God and Christianity are often taken for granted, and it is necessary to look for the meanings and activities these concepts stand for in every situation. As I have tried to demonstrate, the disjuncture between what one says and what one really means is not a recent invention. Therefore, when critics insist on what an author says (e.g., evangelization or ad maiorem), the gesture might appear to be a disavowal of interpretation or its reduction to a repetition of what an author wrote. To do otherwise does not mean to allow the present to contaminate a past that was more pristine and truthful to its words, as if the people who lived in previous centuries were naïve, incapable of deceit, or more coherent than we are, and because of this their statements corresponded exactly to reality, as if they were fully present in every statement they made. It is only by reading multiple sources (historical, literary, and critical) that one can try to achieve a fuller understanding of the context in which a text was produced. This will help us recognize that some texts not only belonged to previous traditions but also inaugurated new ones that looked toward the future, which was still undecided and in the making. In the preface of De procuranda Acosta framed the pages that would follow within the

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establishment of the correct method of evangelization to be used with different populations, of all the peoples of the world—both a synthetical and an analytical task that no one had attempted before and that was therefore necessary for the global expansion of Christianity.29 In his preface to Historia moral he proceeded similarly by explaining that even though by the time he was writing there were many histories of the New World, a new synthesis or new beginning was necessary because until then “the causes and the reason” for the New World’s difference (vis-à-vis Europe) had not been addressed.30 Without neglecting what others had done, his two main works therefore offered other paths. This allows me to say that even if they were not enlightened or fully aware of their situation, at certain moments people like Acosta probably intuited that they were, in fact, leaving behind their own traditions to open up other possibilities. What I have shown here is only one of many possibilities that can emerge from these types of exercises. What would happen, for example, were one to read Sigmund Freud along with works on evangelization written with the goal of changing indigenous people’s way of thinking? In what ways would these texts illuminate each other? Similarly, a reading of Karl Marx along with colonial labor ordinances might be a very productive endeavor. The possibilities have to make sense, of course; they’re not random or capricious, but they can be as plural as the creativity and the culture of reading of the student-researcher in question. For the most part, these pairings remain an unexplored and promising terrain.

Notes 1. José de Acosta (1539–1560) was one of the most influential Jesuits of his time, at least in terms of the relationship between this order and the Spanish imperial experience. He spent one year in Mexico and lived in Peru many years, where he traveled extensively. 2. This is the well-known confrontation in Valladolid (1550) in which las Casas and Sepúlveda debated the morality and legality of the Spanish conquest and the treatment of the indigenous population. 3. José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1984), 335–37. 4. Ibid., chap. 4.

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5. Ibid., 531. 6. José Ortega, Maravillosa reducción y conquista de la provincia del San Joseph del Gran Nayar (Mexico City: Layac, 1994). 7. Jean Meyer, El Gran Nayar (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, 1989). 8. Jacob Baegert, The Letters of Jacob Baegert, 1749–1761: Jesuit Missionary in Baja California (Los Angeles: Dawson’s, 1982), 217. 9. Ibid., 156–57. 10. Philipp Segesser, “The Relation of Philipp Segesser,” Mid-America 27, no. 3 (1945): 161–62. 11. John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 46. 12. Anthony Grafton, “The Rest versus the West,” in Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 98. 13. Anthony Grafton, “José de Acosta: Renaissance Historiography and New World Humanity,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin (New York: Routledge, 2009), 170; José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962). 14. Grafton, “José de Acosta,” 170, 180–83. 15. Ibid., 185. 16. Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995), 2. 17. Acosta, Historia natural, 35–38. 18. Michel Foucault, Las palabras y las cosas: Una arqueología de las ciencias humanas (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1993), 53–56. 19. Edmundo O’Gorman. La invención de América: Investigación acerca de la estructura histórica del nuevo mundo y del sentido de su devenir (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002). 20. William Egginton, “An Epistemology of the Stage: Theatricality and Subjectivity in Early Modern Spain,” New Literary History 27 (1996): 391–413. 21. Stephen Gilman, “An Introduction the Ideology of the Baroque in Spain.” Symposium 1 (1946): 82–107; Egginton, “Epistomology”; José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco (Barcelona, Spain: Ariel, 1998). 22. Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo manual y Arte de Prudencia: Obras completas (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro, 1993), 2:260. 23. Bradley Nelson, “A Ritual Practice for Modernity: Baltasar Gracián’s Organized Body of Taste,” in Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain, and the New World, ed. David Castillo and Massimo Lollini (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 79–100; William Egginton, “Gracián and the Emergence of the Modern Subject,” in Rhetoric and Politics: Baltasar Gracián and

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24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

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the New World Order, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 151–69. Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 81. Erwin Panofsky, “What Is Baroque?” in Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 75. Egginton, “Gracián.” Egginton, “Epistomology”; Anthony J. Cascardi, “Beyond Castro and Maravall: Interpellation, Mimesis, and the Hegemony of Spanish Culture,” in Ideologies of Hispanism, ed. Mabel Moraña (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 138–59. Grafton, “José de Acosta,” 171. Acosta, De procuranda, 61–71. Acosta, Historia natural, 13–14.

Part 2 Conversing with Sources

Chapter 5

Quiet Voices and Laconic Sources



A Synoptic Approach to Wills Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara

Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich once noted, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” 1 Made famous on T-shirts and bumper stickers, this quote generally reads as a celebration of feisty and rebellious women past and present. Well-behaved women are the chumps of the story. But Ulrich coined this phrase with a very different meaning in mind. She later wrote, “My form of misbehavior has been to care about things that others find predictable or boring.” 2 Among these things were ordinary or “well-behaved” women whose daily activities sustained and shaped the societies in which they lived. Yet understanding these women’s lives is challenging, since historical sources generally amplify some voices and hush others, magnify extraordinary episodes, and muffle the “drama” of the “humdrum.” 3 Thus, if well-behaved women seldom make history, the same has long held true for slaves, servants, peasants, and workers as well. Two generations of historians have tackled this challenge by hunting down new sources and reconsidering old ones, reading mediated and distorted testimonies against the grain, forcing laconic sources to speak. As I began my own historical research, I also found myself drawn to the “well-behaved” women of the past and their daily lives. I was particularly curious about how ordinary women in colonial Latin America interacted with the Catholic Church and shaped local religions. Colonial Latin America was, after all, a “religious culture,” in which religion was “stitched into the larger patterns of society and culture,” and it also served as the “principal

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expression of authority and social order.”4 The stereotype of Latin American women as especially devout and as avid supporters of the Catholic Church endures, but beyond that image we actually know very little about ordinary women and their religious lives in the colonial period. The challenge is to find these women in the sources. Foreign travelers and their descriptive notebooks were few and far between. And people who lived in the vast regions under Spanish and Portuguese rule generally did not keep diaries or write letters. In fact, the vast majority of people, particularly women, were illiterate. In the early phases of my research, the rich testimonies of Inquisition records seemed to offer promising insights into daily religious life. But I was interested in studying Central America, a region that was farther removed from the centers of colonial power and hence enjoyed less intensive oversight by the Inquisition. Parish records and other kinds of ecclesiastical court records were also out of my reach, because at the time of my research, Guatemala’s cathedral archive (the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano) was closed indefinitely for reorganization. Wondering if my project was doomed, I began to search for other kinds of sources. People who lived in colonial Latin America might not have kept diaries or written letters, but this was a deeply “juridical” culture, which “authenticated myriad transactions through a notary.” 5 Today notary records fill the shelves of Latin American archives. In these dusty leather-bound volumes I discovered wills as a source material for the first time. All of a sudden ordinary women virtually jumped off the page: elite and non-elite, wealthy widows and struggling single mothers, married shopkeepers and pious maidens. In my initial enthusiasm it seemed that every other will maker was a woman. This was not quite true, but it was very close. Subsequent analysis confirmed that in eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America, approximately 45 percent of will makers in any given year were women.6 The active presence of female will makers reflects both regional and local trends. Unlike the British and French legal traditions, Spanish law ensured that daughters and sons inherited equally, husbands and wives jointly shared ownership of all properties acquired during marriage, and widows regained control of their dowries. As a result Spanish American women were more likely than their French and British counterparts to have property, to survive as single or widowed women, and to make wills. And in general, Spanish American urban

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economies attracted more female migrants than male, which resulted in gender imbalances and high numbers of female-headed households.7 But even within the context of Spanish America, it is surprising to find women representing close to half of all will makers. In eighteenth-century Mexico City, male will makers outnumbered female will makers two to one.8 Although more research is necessary to understand this distinctively local trend, it appears related to the particularly acute gender imbalance of Santiago de Guatemala’s urban population.9 As I began to read will after will, I was also struck by their content. Wills at this time were both legal and religious documents, shaped by inheritance law, Church doctrine, and religious tradition. I was aware that a generation of historians had mined wills for religious data, counting the number of masses endowed by will makers over long periods as a way of charting the changing religious beliefs about salvation and death.10 These studies alerted me to wills as a potential source, but I admit I initially imagined that these documents would be dry and formulaic, laconic and lacking the juicy descriptions found in other kinds of sources. Wills in colonial Latin America were “tightly scripted” documents, but the “script” itself also required will makers to reveal much about themselves: where they were from and their health, family life, preferred funeral and burial arrangements, belongings, religious donations, and designation of executors and witnesses.11 And although formulaic, the wills were also flexible, varying widely in length and detail. Some will makers were terse; others were chatty. Together the formula and the flexibility of the wills provide opportunities to reconstruct individual lives in rich detail as well as discern complex patterns from larger samples. This chapter explores the wills of Guatemalan women to demonstrate how we can make spare words and silences speak by carefully tending to the multiple and—as William Taylor puts it, in reference to E. P. Thompson— “restless” contexts of historical reality. I begin by examining one woman’s will in close detail. How was this document made? What does it reveal, and what does it conceal? How can we work with gaps and silences in the record? I then turn to a discussion of methods and the potential insights provided by a synoptic approach to wills. Louis Mink first conceptualized synoptic thinking as that which is essential to grasping the complexity of historical human experience; “the distinctive characteristic of historical understanding consists of comprehending a complex event by ‘seeing things together’ in a total

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and synoptic judgment.” 12 Over the course of his prolific and distinguished career, William Taylor has built upon and developed Mink’s original concept of synoptic history, always engaging “the challenge of a combined, comprehensive view” in an attempt to understand “past human experience in all of its paradoxes, uncertainties, and silences.” 13 Finally, I explore how a synoptic approach to wills illuminates the complex web of factors that shaped the religious experience of individuals and the broader religious culture of one colonial city in Latin America. In 1753 Isabel María Monrroy called a local notary to her house to make her will.14 Royal law and Church doctrine framed their meeting and the document that was produced that day. The notary brought with him paper of weight, quality, and size approved by the Crown. He charged the legally established fee for the service, and he later bound the document with the rest of his records from 1752 to 1754 in a leather volume, per royal decree.15 And as the notary sat with Isabel, he surely guided her through the legal and religious formulas for wills in this time and place. So although Isabel’s voice comes through in the first person, her words are heavily mediated through the notary’s pen and the customary organization of declarations. Per Spanish law and in order to rule out fraud, notaries directed will makers to begin by identifying themselves in terms of geographical origin, family, and quality of birth—that is, their hometown and current residence and whether they were the legitimate or illegitimate children of their parents, whom they also identified by name. Women sometimes identified themselves further in relation to their husband, as a wife or a widow. Following this formula, Isabel began her will with the following: “In the name of the all powerful God Amen, . . . I, Isabel María Monrroy, natural and vecina [resident or citizen] of this city of Santiago de Guatemala, hija natural [illegitimate daughter] of Juana de Dios Monrroy, who is dead.” The opening is formulaic and terse. But there are also “restless” historical contexts packed into these sparse words and silences. By carefully putting the text in historical context, we might force this brief phrase and the longer laconic source to speak. In the following analysis, I establish this historical context in three ways. Some trends reflect broader regional contexts, and thus I look to historical studies of Mexico, Peru, or other regions of Spanish America and the broader Spanish empire. But, as noted above, colonial Central America, and

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its capital city Santiago de Guatemala, also exhibited distinctive characteristics within colonial Spanish America. Whenever possible I situate my analysis in the local context by considering historical scholarship on Central America and Santiago de Guatemala. Finally, I construct the local historical context through my own broader survey of 539 wills made between 1700 and 1870. Isabel first identified herself by her full name, Isabel Maria Monrroy. She did not use the honorific title of doña, nor did the notary identify her this way in his index. The absence of an honorific title in this time and place suggests that Isabel was of non-elite status and perhaps of a mixed racial background.16 She confirmed that she was originally from Santiago de Guatemala. Though married, she did not identify herself by her relation to her husband and noted only that she was the “hija natural” of her mother, Juana de Dios Monrroy. In a Spanish system that recognized gradations of legitimacy, “hijo [or hija] natural” fell between the categories of legitimate and bastard. Unlike bastards, who were born of adulterous or other scandalous unions, hijos naturales were born to unmarried parents who could legally marry if they so desired. Indeed, hijos naturales were automatically and retroactively legitimated if their parents subsequently married.17 This lesser form of legitimacy was quite common in colonial Spanish America, and although this status stained one’s honor, it was also a significantly better position than bastard. So Isabel’s status is not surprising, but her testimony does raise questions. Isabel omits any reference to her father, and her silence suggests a more complex picture. Perhaps her parents’ union was brief or ended badly, and her father refused to recognize Isabel as a daughter. Or perhaps she simply feigned ignorance because her father was a priest or was married to another woman. If this were the case, a question mark was better than the indelible stain of the truth. It’s impossible to be certain what Isabel knew or what she might be hiding, but in any case she was not alone in her strategy of evasion. A review of hundreds of wills confirms that will makers resisted self-identification as bastards. Not one will maker ever claimed this lowly status, opting instead to self-identify as an hijo or hija natural or omitting a reference to legitimacy altogether. Following the customary format, Isabel then noted that she was sick in bed by virtue of an accident, and she proceeded to make a pious declaration of faith. Matching the declarations made by her neighbors almost word for word, she surely counted on some coaching from the notary at her side. After

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this declaration, the next order of business was to make arrangements for her funeral and burial. According to Catholic doctrine and popular belief, how and where a body was buried could influence the fate of the soul, as could indulgences acquired through the endowment of masses or pious works. Isabel requested that her body be dressed in the habit of St. Francis and buried under the floors of the San Francisco convent church. She stipulated that the funeral be “without pomp of any kind, which is despicable in the eyes of the Lord.” 18 Her Franciscan burial habit and modest funeral arrangements invoked a model of Christian humility that became increasingly popular toward the end of the eighteenth century.19 Isabel was no anomaly, but she was slightly ahead of the trend, at least within Guatemala. Her discussion of her funeral and the days after her burial provide further glimpses of her daily religious life. She indicated that she was a member of the Archicofradía of the Holy Sacrament in the cathedral as well as the Brotherhood of San Antonio in the Franciscan friary, and as such counted upon these religious associations to pay the costs of her burial. She affirmed a connection to the Franciscan missionary College of the Crucified Christ, also known as Recolección Convent, requesting that 100 masses be said there for the good of her soul. The notary then steered the declaration toward a discussion of more worldly concerns, specifically marriage, family, and property. Unlike the British and French models, which assumed that husbands privately owned and controlled household fortunes, Spanish property law declared that husbands and wives enjoyed joint ownership of all wealth acquired during their marriage. And even though husbands managed their wives’ dowries and properties during the marriage, these reverted to the wife’s control at the time of the husband’s death.20 It was thus important for will makers to detail all the goods or capital they brought into the marriage. And since Spanish law also required an equal division of the inheritance among the surviving children, will makers also needed to confirm how many children were surviving and whether these children had already received portions of their rightful inheritance. The story Isabel told in this section was one of poverty and social mobility, love and loss. She was clearly poor throughout much of her early life, bringing no belongings to her first marriage, to a man who was equally poor. Through her labor and that of her first husband, they were able to buy a house

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and begin a family. Then tragedy struck. Their first and only child died before her third birthday, and her husband passed sometime after that. Isabel then married a second time. This husband was also poor, although he did bring to the marriage one thatch-covered house valued at 100 pesos. Perhaps he was ill when they married, because she claimed to have financially supported him for the duration of their marriage, which lasted only a month and a half before he too passed away. She inherited the humble house as well as the care of her two stepchildren. According to Isabel, her inheritance was barely enough to cover the costs of the funeral and to care for her stepchildren, a responsibility she maintained for two years. She noted that her stepchildren later sued her for fifty pesos, which they saw as their rightful inheritance. Although the matter appears to have been resolved legally, Isabel’s detailed justification suggests ongoing bad feelings. At the time Isabel made out her will, she had been married eleven years to her third husband. Like her previous spouses, this husband brought minimal wealth to the marriage: just two mules and three horses, worth a total of eighty pesos. But by the time Isabel married him, she claimed as her own approximately 1,500 pesos worth of belongings, including a house that she had built additions onto, clothes, and furnishings. It is curious that she mentions dried fish among her belongings; it thus seems likely that the sale of dried fish was at least one way she supported herself. At this point, the notary may have paused to ask Isabel if she had any more matters to attend. Besides noting any debts and debtors, she was free to wrap up the will at this point with a brief listing of executors and witnesses. But Isabel had more to say. Without living parents or children, she was free of forced heirs and thus able to bequeath her worldly goods as she desired. As she identified various beneficiaries in subsequent clauses, she provided some clues about the household and religious networks that surrounded her during her years of marriage and widowhood. After her daughter died, Isabel never had another child; however, like many of her contemporaries she adopted a child, a baby girl named Anna. In this time and place children in non-elite families typically provided essential labor, and the line between adopted orphans and servants could be particularly blurry.21 And if Anna offered support to the household, her position was not merely as a servant. Isabel gave Anna her own last name and helped to arrange a suitable marriage for her. She wished for Anna to receive all her clothes and a pearl

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necklace as well as 100 pesos. Isabel also emphasized her relationship with her siblings. She specifically affirmed that her brother, Miguel Monrroy, had always been especially supportive and had contributed his own labor to her business negotiations. It appears that Miguel lived with Isabel and her husband, and Isabel explicitly stated that both her husband and her brother should enjoy the use of her house for the rest of their days. Isabel also dedicated multiple clauses to her devotional relationship with the Santa Lucía chapel. Within this church she had developed a special devotion for the images of Our Lady of Sorrows and the Nazarene Christ. Since she was free from forced heirs, in the absence of a living child or parent, she was able to dedicate substantial portions of her worldly belongings to these devotions. Hence she specified that she wanted to sponsor the ritual round of nine masses every year for the image of Our Lady and a mass every Friday in honor of the Nazarene Christ. Isabel creatively arranged for these to be paid by her husband in return for his continued residence in her house—in effect charging her husband rent and using the proceeds to further her devotions and gain suffrages for her soul. After her husband’s death, Isabel decided, the house should go to Santa Lucía’s resident priest, with the stipulation that he use all the rent to continue this devotion in perpetuity. Her devotion extended to the church building as well. “For the great devotion and affection that I have always had for the church [of Santa Lucía],” she noted, she wanted to leave 100 pesos for the purposes of reconstruction after the 1751 earthquake. These funds were to be entrusted to Santa Lucía’s priest, with whom Isabel clearly had a close relationship. In the closing lines of her will, she listed this priest among the witnesses for her will. Perhaps he was even the witness who signed the document in her stead, since she did not know how to write her name. This is an undeniably imperfect source. Even though Isabel was a fairly chatty will maker, the document is full of gaps and silences, hemmed in by the formulaic nature of wills and filtered by the notary’s pen at all times. We do not know for sure how Isabel supported herself, where exactly she lived in the city, or if she was of Spanish, indigenous, African, or mixed racial descent. Like many in this time and place, she omitted a detailed inventory of her belongings. And we find only the faintest traces of Isabel’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Yet this source does provide fragmentary glimpses of her life and the society in which she lived.

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How can we work with such fragments to gain a better understanding of the past? One strategy fruitfully employed by historians is to zoom out and consider a will like Isabel’s in the context of hundreds or thousands of other wills from the same city or region over multiple centuries. In this approach each individual clause of the will can tell a story. How many masses did Isabel and her contemporaries endow, on average? How do those averages change from one generation to the next or throughout many generations? Because the number of masses endowed tells us something about how people approached death, heaven and hell, God, and salvation, answering these questions illuminates subtle cultural and religious changes that unfolded over time. Other clauses have other stories to tell. How many will makers were able to sign their names? How many resided far from their birthplace? How many named their spouses as executors? Or how many opted to communicate their wishes privately to family members rather than reveal them openly in a will? Answering these questions provides opportunities to explore patterns of movement and migration, literacy rates, and the development of intimacy and trust among family members. Other lines of inquiry emerge from a synoptic approach. As a result of Spanish law, religious doctrine, and customary practice, wills produced in colonial Spanish America tell many stories simultaneously. Rather than follow the story line of the individual clauses found in wills, a synoptic approach attempts to understand how these stories all “exist (and change) together” within the lives of individuals and within broader societies.22 This requires holding the macro and the micro, the larger and the smaller, in mind at the same time, alert to the reality that complex individual experience does not always fit neatly in the broad sweep of history. This is open-ended work that requires an exploration of silences and a certain comfort with uncertainty and questions left unanswered. Building on the synoptic approach, the following analysis charts just one possible path, trying to see how religion, family, work, movement, and material culture intersected and intertwined in the lives of women and in a broader community. Isabel’s will contains multiple clauses that reflect aspects of her religious life: the arrangements for her funeral and burial, requests for masses in the days after her death, religious donations, and the creation of more complex endowments meant to fund masses for particular devotions in perpetuity. Together these clauses illustrate Isabel’s active participation in the local

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religious culture of eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala. During her lifetime she clearly participated in confraternities and feast days, developed a close personal relationship with a priest, and planned to become a benefactor after her death by supporting efforts to rebuild a church and promote the faith. Locating Isabel’s devotional connections on a map reveals that she was not only religiously active but also mobile. We don’t know exactly where Isabel lived, although it seems she was a parishioner in the central cathedral parish. In any case it is clear that Isabel traveled widely within the city, because she had close ties to churches, chapels, and convents in different neighborhoods, from the Franciscan convent on the eastern border of the cathedral parish to the Recolección convent on the far western edge of the city in the poorer parish of San Sebastián. How exactly did Isabel form these relationships with churches spread across the city? Processions and short-distance pilgrimages known as romerías surely inspired religious movement within and around Santiago de Guatemala.23 Yet a broader survey of wills suggests that most will makers in this time and place cultivated devotional connections closer to home, either in their parish church or at nearby convents and chapels.24 The discrepancy between the macro and the micro invites further inquiry into the particular contexts for Isabel’s devotional mobility. Her will provides some potential clues. Based on her social background and the brief reference to dried fish among her belongings, it seems plausible that Isabel worked in marketing, a field dominated by women in Santiago de Guatemala as well as in other colonial Spanish American cities. Did marketing connect Isabel to both the local economy and local devotional networks as well? The level of wealth declared by Isabel suggests that she had moved beyond itinerant peddling, yet she makes no reference to owning a store. Was she one of Santiago’s ambulatory female marketers, weaving her way through the streets, swaying under the weight of a basket of goods balanced on her head? Did her daily or weekly sales circuit bring her by the open doors of these particular churches? Marketers also played a key role in the fairs that inevitably accompanied local feast days and religious celebrations. Perhaps Isabel participated in local fairs and this participation facilitated certain devotional attachments. Isabel’s will offers no definitive answers to these questions. But the potential connections between marketing and religious movement come into

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sharper focus by looking at another woman’s will from this time and place. A few years after Isabel made her will, doña María de Ubeda called upon another local notary to record her last will and testament.25 Her social status is somewhat ambiguous. She claimed the honorific title of doña, but she did not come from a wealthy family. When it came time to marry, her family was unable to provide her with a dowry, and she ultimately married a muleteer, a position at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Perhaps doña María was a criolla, a person of Spanish descent, and this racial or ethnic identity was enough to confer an honorable status regardless of class standing. In any case, over the course of their marriage, doña María and her husband were able to acquire a store, a house, furnishings, and slaves, all through their joint “sweat and labor.” 26 It is very likely that doña María “worked where [she] lived” and “lived where [she] worked,” since most houses in colonial Santiago de Guatemala maintained rooms with separate street entrances to support small- or medium-size stores.27 One might also safely assume that doña María was generally in charge of the store, since women in eighteenth-century Santiago predominated in this kind of petty commerce and since her husband would regularly be on the road with the mule trains. Doña María and her husband had no children, so she was largely free to dispose of her portion of their wealth as she saw fit. After providing for her mother, doña María dedicated the majority of her earthly possessions to friaries, churches, and chapels scattered throughout Santiago de Guatemala and beyond. These clauses of her will provide a glimpse of the devotional networks that doña María cultivated during her lifetime and again raise questions about the possible relationship between marketing and religious movement. Of particular note are references to regional shrines and pilgrimage sites. Doña María indicated to her executors that she wanted to fulfill a promise to donate twelve pounds of wax to the Black Christ of Esquipulas, a renowned miraculous image and pilgrimage site of Central America. She also offered her devotional gold locket and chain, or reliquary, to the reputedly miraculous Christ Child image in the indigenous town of Pampiche, also known as Amatitlán. Did doña María actually visit these regional shrines, which were both a few days’ journey from Santiago de Guatemala? Did she get to whisper her prayers to them in person? Or did she somehow develop these devotions

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from afar? The record is silent, but once again the broader commercial context offers us some potential clues. Pilgrimage sites like Esquipulas and Amatitlán were at the center of Central America’s economy in the eighteenth century because trade was carried out through a network of fairs, often celebrated in conjunction with the feast days of local patron saints and miraculous images.28 It is very possible that in the case of doña María, her husband’s position as a muleteer and their ownership of a store facilitated her travel to the fairs of Esquipulas and Amatitlán. Perhaps she was one of the many shrine visitors who seamlessly blended business with pleasure and religious pilgrimage. Doña María’s commercial connections may have facilitated devotional attachments in other ways as well. Pilgrimage sites like Esquipulas and Amatitlán generated miracle stories and all kinds of devotional souvenirs—replicas, prayer books, ribbons, candles—which were often believed to transport a little miraculous essence along with them. Doña María probably enjoyed privileged access to these items through family members involved in commerce and transportation as well as through suppliers, creditors, and clients. In the end, whether she stayed at home or made a pilgrimage, doña María appears as one of the city’s conduits for the burgeoning regional devotions to the Black Christ of Esquipulas and the Christ Child of Amatitlán. It appears that the commercial relations that pervaded so many households connected women not only to local economies but also to broader devotional networks. Marketing and movement thus appear as potentially important contexts for understanding how women developed geographically broad religious networks. Wills suggest other kinds of contexts as well. When the wealthy and elite doña Rosa de Arroyave y Beteta dictated her will in 1753, she made pious donations to the Jesuit, Mercedarian, Carmelite, Concepcionist, and Recolección convent churches, as well as to the Beaterio of Belén (the female auxiliary of the Bethlehemite Hospital Order) and the regional shrine of Esquipulas.29 Doña Rosa explicitly explained her connection to these churches in the context of family networks. She wanted to be buried in the Mercedarian Church alongside her ancestors. Her daughters were professed nuns in the Carmelite and Concepción convents, and her son was professed as a missionary Franciscan in the College of the Crucified Christ (Recolección convent). Wealth and access to horses and carriages probably further facilitated doña Rosa’s relationships with churches around the city and

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beyond. Viewed next to the case studies of Isabel and doña María, doña Rosa’s case illustrates the diversity of female experience in eighteenthcentury Santiago de Guatemala and the varied contexts for female mobility and devotional relationships. It is tempting to suggest that mobile women like these, albeit from very different contexts, played a unique role in the local religious culture of Santiago de Guatemala by forging devotional relationships that linked parts of the city and the broader region. Perhaps they did. But the gaps in the record require caution. Like all sources, wills from this time and place amplify the voices of some and muffle the voices of others. Individuals with living heirs had less discretion over their inheritances and were often laconic as a result. In contrast, the women examined here were free from forced heirs because they had no living children or their children had renounced their inheritance upon entering religious orders. These women were thus at liberty to dedicate much of their wealth to their devotional interests, and they chose to describe those devotions in great detail. Some will makers concealed whereas others revealed, leaving us with fragments of the whole story. Our picture is incomplete, yet the fragments we do have offer undeniably rare and fascinating glimpses into the lives of “well-behaved women” in a colonial Latin American city. This chapter has taken a synoptic approach to wills, attempting to understand these women’s lives by examining the critical contexts of family, work, and devotion and imagining the multiple ways in which these contexts might intertwine and overlap.

Notes 1. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Vertuous [sic] Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735,” American Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1976): 20. 2. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), xxx. 3. Ulrich, “Vertuous Women,” 22. 4. Kenneth R. Mills, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, eds., Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2002), xxvii–xxviii. 5. Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83. 6. I examined every will produced, whether by a man or a woman, in Guatemala’s capital during thirteen selected years between 1700 and 1870—a total of 539 wills.

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7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

Female will makers consistently represented 45–50 percent of all will makers between 1700 and 1820. From 1820 to 1870 female will makers represented 56 percent of all will makers. Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 113. Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 20. On the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gender imbalance of Santiago de Guatemala, see Catherine Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala: The Eve of Independence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). See, e.g., Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provénce au XVIIIe siècle: Les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses testaments (Paris: Plon, 1973); Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Antonio Peñafiel Ramón, Testamento y buena muerte: Un studio de mentalidades en Murcia del siglo XVIII (Murcia, Spain: Academia Alfonso X, 1987); María José Pascua Sánchez, Actitudes ante la muerte en el Cádiz de la primera mitad del siglo XVIII (Cádiz, Spain: Diputación de Cádiz, 1984). Kathryn Burns, “Forms of Authority: Women’s Legal Representations in MidColonial Cuzco,” in Women, Texts, and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World, ed. Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 159. Louis O. Mink, “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding,” History and Theory 5, no. 1 (1966): 42. William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 2, 207n3. Will of Isabel María Monrroy, 1753, Archivo General de Centroamérica (AGCA), sig. A1, leg. 1458, exp. 9948, 274v–78f. For a discussion of laws governing notaries in colonial Spanish America, see Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 27. Komisaruk, Labor and Love, 14, noted that in colonial Guatemala the honorific titles of don and doña were often “ethnic markers,” used to express Spanish identity as well as elite status. Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 128. Monrroy will, 275v: “sin pompa alguna por ser esta despreciable en la presencia Divina.” For a discussion of eighteenth-century Catholic reform movements and

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20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

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specifically the increasing popularity of modest funeral arrangements, see Pamela Voekel, Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Susan Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9. Christopher Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 159. He notes that non-elite households in eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala generally lacked the resources to formally pay for a servant and instead relied upon criados, children who would provide services in return for room and board. My own research on wills suggests that the household position of criados could vary widely, from lowly servant to adopted daughter or son. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images, 2. He cited historical geographer Donald Meinig’s point that “history ‘is not the study of any particular kind of thing, but a particular way of studying almost anything’; reckoning with ‘how all kinds of things exist (and change) together’ in place and time.” Donald W. Meinig, A Life of Learning: Charles H. Haskins Lecture (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1992), 18–19. For a longer discussion of romerías, see Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images, 136. For a longer discussion of these findings, see Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara, “Intimate Indulgences: Salvation and Local Religion in Eighteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala,” Colonial Latin American Review 23, 2 (2014): 252–79. Will of doña María de Ubeda, 1761, AGCA, sig. A1, leg. 492, 117v–18f. Ibid., 118f: “Sudor y trabajo.” Juan Javier Pescador, “Vanishing Woman: Female Migration and Ethnic Identity in Late Colonial Mexico City,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 4 (1995): 621. He noted that for colonial Mexico City “it must be stressed that the majority of the population worked where they lived or lived where they worked.” The architecture of colonial homes in Santiago de Guatemala with separate entrances for storerooms reinforces Pescador’s argument. For a discussion of colonial architecture in Santiago de Guatemala, see Verle Lincoln Annis, The Architecture of Antigua Guatemala, 1543–1773 (Guatemala City: University of San Carlos, 1968). Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, “The Economy of Central America: From Bourbon Reforms to Liberal Reforms,” in Central America, 1821–1871: Liberalism before Liberal Reform, ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 67. Will of doña Rosa de Arroyave y Beteta, 1753, AGCA, sig. A1, leg. 1458, exp. 9948, 188f–91v.

Chapter 6

Researching beyond Institutional Documents



T he Power of Suggestion Rachel Moore

In this chapter I will focus on historical projects that call upon their researchers to wrangle a vast range of documents into a coherent and cohesive historical argument. I am calling this kind of historical evidence diffuse documentation because there is not one kind of document or even one central term that unites the documents. This type of documentation and the historical studies that result differ considerably from other historical studies that use more clearly defined groups of evidence. The researcher using diffuse documentation might start with a broad concept, as I did with my first research project, and then search for examples of that concept. I chose to examine how travel, communication, and nationalism influenced one another in Mexico’s main travel corridor in the nineteenth century: the road network between its Atlantic port of Veracruz and the national capital of Mexico City. In contrast, the researcher using a more defined group of evidence might draw upon evidence linked by a common institution or element—such as the Catholic Church or salt—and build his or her argument from there. Whereas the researcher working with diffuse documentation might go from the broad to the particular, the researcher using a more defined group of documents might go from particular examples to broad conclusions. The diffuse nature of documentation also often extends to the ways in which researchers set the chronological parameters for their studies. An essay on primarily nineteenth-century documentation, for instance, may

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seem out of place in a volume on the colonial period. However, the continuities between the late colonial period and the first half of the nineteenth century (and sometimes beyond) are significant enough that observations made by a trained colonialist (now early national) historian might be considered relevant. Indeed, others have coined the term “long nineteenth century” 1 to identify just such work. Furthermore, the approaches I discuss in this essay are relevant to people working outside this period. Although the specific types of sources available for other times (and places, for that matter) may be different, many of the challenges, opportunities, and ways of thinking with diffuse documentation are not. Conducting a historical study based on diffuse documents is not necessarily harder or easier than conducting any other type of historical study. Every kind of history poses its own challenges. However, it is worth addressing the many ways in which historical documents can be brought together and used as the foundation for a wide range of historical arguments. The endless avenues of inquiry opened by a single document indicate that even if one more new document were never to materialize, there would still be histories to write. For example, I used the road itineraries published throughout the nineteenth century in Mexico to illustrate how the two routes between Veracruz and Mexico City had highly distinct public profiles: one was thought of as the route between Veracruz and Mexico City, whereas the other was considered a local transit road. The same itineraries could be used for a history of the development of Mexico’s infrastructure or a history of defensive measures taken by the Mexican government. By contextualizing a document differently, a historian is able to tell a different story. This should prove reassuring to researchers who do not have a vast range of primary sources at their fingertips. In this chapter I will give a brief overview of how a research project involving diffuse sources might evolve, be realized, and ultimately be received by the historical establishment. The remarks here should not be regarded as encouragement to engage in such a project or as a cautionary tale. Instead they are intended to show what might be expected when you are seized with an intriguing and unshakable hankering about a historical subject, as I was so many years ago. At the early stages of any research endeavor—and especially one that draws upon diffuse sources outside the institutional milieu—keeping the

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questions malleable allows the project to maintain momentum and relevance. When asked how he arrived at the subject of his book on the perceptions of space in colonial Mexico, anthropologist Jonathan Amith replied that he had encountered “constant forks in the road.” He added, “I don’t think I envisioned where I would arrive when I started.” 2 In conceiving of his study on religious tolerance, Stuart Schwartz found himself following a similar path that led him away from established areas of study to more amorphous considerations. “My subject in this book is not the history of religious toleration, by which is usually meant state or community policy,” he explained, “but rather of tolerance, by which I mean attitudes or sentiments.” 3 It is clear that both scholars constantly revisited how they were framing their subject so as to capture both exactly what they wanted to argue and what the documentary record had to tell them. Reference to “the documentary record” instills a cohesiveness into the collection of spotty court cases, travelers’ accounts, shipping records, newspaper stories, and lithographs that I personally never encountered in my research. A day’s work, even a year’s work, often left me feeling that I had a wealth of fascinating anecdotes at my fingertips. The diversity and scope of these anecdotes have a great capacity to intrigue at cocktail parties but little ability to convince. It was reassuring to discover that others engaged in this type of research experience similar misgivings. “Ideas have no consistent record,” wrote Henry Schmidt in a book review of works on liberalism and the history of ideas.4 Ideas, perceptions, attitudes, and sentiments are all elusive in definition and documentary base. In the absence of consistent records, how does one engage in a project for which there are only wildly diffuse sources available? I chose to start by considering the foundational concepts that brought me to my project in the first place: travel, communication, and nationalism. Travelers in Latin America generated piles of paper both with their own hands and by their circulation through the ports and roads of the New World. Travel literature is considered a genre in and of itself. In the colonial period the novelty of Latin America brought travelers to generate dozens of images and vivid descriptions of the inhabitants and landscape of this “new world.” Hernan Cortés wrote dozens of letters to the king of Spain about his experiences, as did the more pedestrian of new residents of Latin America, among them tanners and weavers.

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By the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries—the period in which I was interested—the political and economic opportunities available in Latin America joined the novelty of the setting as motivations to write—and write, and write. Nancys Leys Stepan has argued that “more naturalists, painters, and commercial travelers probably went from Europe to the New World tropics in the nineteenth century than to any other tropical region.” 5 The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt extensively toured Latin America in the early 1800s and published an extensive and widely read monograph on his experience as a result. The German naturalist Carl Sartorius purchased a hacienda in the region between Xalapa and Orizaba shortly after his arrival in Mexico in 1824 and encouraged fellow Germans to emigrate to the country as well.6 Fellow naturalist Karl Heller traveled through Mexico from 1845 to 1848 gathering specimens for the Royal Botanical Society of Austria. His account, lesser known but equally as vivid in description, first appeared in print in 1853.7 Travel literature allowed me vivid perspectives on the region that interested me. However, I remained curious about the Mexican perspective on both the travelers themselves and the routes between Veracruz and Mexico City that they traversed. This brought me to the second broad theme of my research: communication. What were Mexicans saying to one another about the many travelers that passed through their cities and towns? How did these travelers affect the Mexicans’ relationships with one another, the nation, and the Atlantic world? I believed that these questions were best answered by examining the communications that passed between individuals in both the media and letters. Communication is such a wide-ranging concept that it required employing diffuse documentation. Information exchange within a single town or between Mexico’s main port and Mexico’s national capital could involve spoken words, letters, newspapers, and occasionally even codes. For information to reach its destination it had to variously evade the eyes of chaperones, remain accurately in the mind of a messenger, jostle around as a posted letter or as contraband carried by a muleteer, and remain in good favor with local postmasters, who were often loath to pass on the letters of rival political partisans. Even if information successfully passed through this gauntlet and arrived at its destination, some of it was perceived of as credible and some was not. The information gauntlet began with the gathering of information itself.

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Information in the nineteenth century was exchanged everywhere, of course. However, what interested me more was how information moved over longer distances and how it brought communities together. Like others, Mexicans themselves debated the parameters of who they were in letters and, more publicly, newspapers. The explosion in the number of newspapers available in Mexico in the nineteenth century reflected improvements in technology and literacy as much as it did a growing appetite for periodicals. Newspapers during this period drew upon the opinions of their editors as well as the local community for their material. The interior pages of these publications are full of letters to the editor. Thus there are some indications of how the local population reacted to published news. Although newspapers did not reflect the views of the entirety of the population, they did provide a window into the public face that regions in Mexico fashioned for themselves. It became clear as I consulted newspapers that there were some communities with which the editors identified and others with which they did not. In November 1838, for instance, as French troops amassed off the coast of Veracruz and bombarded the fortress at San Juan de Ulúa, a journalist begged those living in the interior, “MEXICANS, OPEN YOUR EYES!!!!!” 8 Apparently the residents of points farther west remained skeptical of the imminent threat of invasion. The journalist, though based in Xalapa, keenly felt the threat of the French in Veracruz. He recognized the impact an invasion would have on Xalapa and clearly marveled at the indifference of some in Mexico City. A simple exhortation thus reveals volumes about local affiliations and regional tensions that ran through Mexico in the nineteenth century. Since my research examined communication along a travel corridor rather than in a specific city, I found myself looking into how individuals might have obtained newspapers and letters and how frequently. As in many other aspects of this project, I employed institutional sources in a selective and noninstitutional way. I spent a great deal of time researching postal customs and regulations in Mexico. I use the term postal customs because many letters and other written communications were transported without using the postal service. Muleteers and private messengers frequently carried letters to speed them on their way and avoid potentially crooked postmasters. To discern how information passed through this more informal postal system, I looked at the prosecutions of individuals for carrying

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contraband. Contraband included letters outside official mailbags and letters not bearing appropriate postal markings for the time. Letters passing through the official postal service did not carry prepaid postage for most of the period I examined. Instead the letter recipients were obligated to pay the postage due. Postage stamps appeared in Mexico in 1847, when the nation was embroiled in the Mexican-American War. This means that even though a letter was sent, it might not have been retrieved and read until the recipient had the time to go to the post office and pay the postage due. This often added to any delays caused by poor road conditions, bad weather, bandit attacks, and lazy postal employees. Complaints about postal employees surfaced in the institutional documentation of the Mexican post office throughout the colonial and independence periods. During the colonial period complaints focused on delays in mail service or the poor condition of mail when it did arrive. After independence and during the periods of political turmoil that followed, complaints focused more on postal workers tampering with the mail. For instance, postmasters occasionally pruned the arriving mail of any publications they found at odds with their personal political views. The volatile nature of the political arena in Mexico during this period meant that postmasters often stood at political odds with the populations to which they ministered. When this happened, many postmasters used their position to indulge personal political vendettas by destroying newspapers and personal correspondence that expressed sympathies toward the opposition party or parties. Such was the case with Faustino Capetillo, the postmaster of Xalapa in 1824. Local residents complained that Capetillo habitually opened recently arrived mailbags in the middle of the night and burned any publications or correspondence that disagreed with his political beliefs.9 These complaints offer insights for both institutional and noninstitutional histories. In an institutional sense, the complaints indicate how reliable the postal service was during the colonial and independence periods. They reflect how the institution handled interruptions in—or the complete absence of—service. In a noninstitutional sense, the complaints lay out the expectations that members of the public had of the postal service, postal workers, and civil servants in general. For example, when French troops on their way to occupy to Mexico City overran Puebla in 1863, they imprisoned a number of members of the Mexican army, then led by Mexico’s first

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indigenous president, Benito Juarez. Among them was the postmaster, Manuel Aburto. According to court testimony from Aburto’s wife, Vicenta, Aburto had been drafted into service to handle military correspondence during Juarez’s first term as president (1861–1863) in an incident that was “highly violent and impossible to resist.” Despite protests by Aburto that “he had the character of a civil servant,” the invading troops sent him to France to be held as a prisoner of war. In her appeal to the authorities for his salary, Vicenta argued that her husband served as an “employee of the Mexican Nation and not a particular party.” 10 The communication section of my research also called upon me to actually communicate. Researching any project, institutional or not, can be incredibly insular and isolating. The thought that “no one is working on this” can be invigorating, terrifying, and thoroughly depressing all at the same time. At many points during the research for my first book, I found myself wondering whether the documents and anecdotes I had surrounded myself with were a burgeoning cocoon from which a fully realized historical project would emerge or a festering fruit that was, in truth, rotten at its core. Some semblance of confidence and security were obtained only when I realized that while it was true that “no one was working on this,” there were others who were working on topics like this. And some of these people were still living and in reach of a computer.11 Contact with researchers engaged in similar enterprises often serves as a lifeline for those engaged in research projects with diffuse sources. The only way to uncover these contacts is to read as broadly as one can. Look to other disciplines and other regions. Follow up on professional organizations that are new to you. Achieving these things involves, at its most focused, combing bibliographies of books relevant to one’s work and, at its most optimistic, running search words relevant to one’s topic through online search engines and scholarly article databases. The more one looks, the more one will find individuals with mutual interests outside one’s academic field and occasionally outside academics entirely. I personally cannot thank the large community of philatelists on the East Coast enough for gamely listening to my papers at postal history conferences and offering helpful suggestions. At the end of the research phase of my project, I had amassed a body of research as diverse in its nature as in its provenance. Roughly 60 percent of

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my primary sources were published, and roughly 40 percent of them were archival documents. Thus a preponderance of my sources were marginally more accessible than my other sources. If I were to be asked whether my conclusions were driven by archival or published research, I would say both. However, others might perceive it differently. Travel accounts and newspapers are (comparatively) easier to use and sift through than archival sources. Perhaps this does not satisfy the masochistic side of all historical researchers. Henry Schmidt has alluded to the preference of some historians (and book reviewers) for projects driven by archival sources; in his comments on the reviewed works of Jacqueline Covo, François-Xavier Guerra, Claude Dumas, and Alan Knight, he wrote, “While in the main they are political studies, their research is not centered in archival data, which may be gratifying to some and disappointing to others. They are concerned with linkages and contexts that have less to do with linear, surface logic and more with history as a symbolic system of knowledge.” 12 Truly, there is no one gold standard of historical evidence. Research in an archive presents the historian with the opportunity to uncover something unseen or unstudied by recent historians. It appeals to the more swashbuckling side of those who engage in hours of thoroughly nonswashbuckling tasks such as checking footnotes and scrolling through microfilm. An archival find possibly allows one to say something new about a historical topic. That said, the newness in historical research comes as much from new perspectives on available documents as it does from new discoveries of previously unexamined documents. It is impossible to see every document that might have some bearing on a historical project. However, reading the signs of the documentary record—both the lacunae and the boxes filled to bursting—is telling in and of itself. Voices that are not easily heard in the documentary records or files that are casually tossed away are indications of a society’s priorities and biases. Acknowledging this indicates that one is aware of the exact nature of one’s project and why its conclusions may be convincing to some and not others. The conclusions initially offered up by a diffuse body of historical evidence differ considerably from those gleaned from a more consistent documentary record. The set of documents that allows one to draw a richly textured portrait of a particular period may be absent for another period. Or the types of documents used for different periods may vary widely. Thus the

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impulse for self-preservation may drive one to write a study that is more episodic than it is progressive. Diffuse documentation lends itself to what has been called the synchronic approach to history, which focuses on documenting a particular moment in history in great depth. This type of historical narration plays to the strengths of a body of documents that may not include serial evidence—that is, long runs of similar documents from an extended period. However, as in every historical study, there is a story of change over time to be told. This attention to change over time—the diachronic approach—looks to discern the processes involved in historical developments. In their study of urbanization in Latin America, Douglas Butterworth and John Chance compared the two approaches in the following way: “While the concept of urbanization, however it is used, always implies a process of social transformation through time, the notion of urbanism refers to a state, without regard to the time element. ‘Urbanization’ employs a processual, diachronic perspective to analyze the process of becoming urban, while ‘urbanism’ is structural and synchronic and refers to what it means to be urban.” 13 Although it is less intuitive to draw upon the diachronic approach in writing studies that involve diffuse sources, this approach captures the coalescing of connections and affinities in a way no other approach can. Just because documents are different does not mean they cannot be cohesive and illuminate historical change. However, that historical change may manifest first in one perspective and then another. The tying together of these perspectives requires making larger arguments that may induce intrigued squinting from some and peeved guffaws from others. Some audiences will find arguments that draw on diffuse sources more convincing than others. Serial archival evidence bestows impressive historical heft on any study. The stability of the document base allows for conclusions to be made about change over time and variations between regions. A study based on anomalies or widely divergent sources lacks such a documentary foundation. There is, necessarily, more emphasis on connections and affinities than on statistically significant trends. A study in which there is no clear source base often achieves the designation of being “suggestive” or “provocative.” 14 It rarely, however, achieves the affirmation of being “definitive.” 15 A reviewer of Stuart Schwartz’s work on attitudes toward religious tolerance

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among the non-elite noted in the first paragraph of his review that Schwartz “avoids a quantitative methodology, preferring to examine case studies.” The reviewer concluded, “This book represents a far-reaching, thoughtful, entertaining, and provocative study of dissidence and toleration. As other reviewers will no doubt point out and as Schwartz is well aware, the data presented here cannot provide hard and fast answers to the difficult (perhaps unanswerable) questions about how widespread these views were, what direct influence they played in the broader trend toward more open societies, and how and why these ideas changed over time. Nonetheless, this book will remain an important sounding board for future studies that examine the cultural history of ideas of the common folk.” 16 Another work of Atlantic history, this one by Carla Gardina Pestana on religion and the making of the British Atlantic world, was reviewed by someone who wrote that Pestana “introduces key sites for future scholarly interrogation.” 17 What reviewers who crave serial evidence might not consider is that a work of historical observation and suggestion is an end in and of itself, not a mark of insufficient diligence. In his introduction Schwartz was up front about the number of cases used for his study, stating, “My research has revealed hundreds of cases of people who expressed some kind of attitude of religious tolerance, relativism, universalism, or skepticism.” However, he argued that his sample size did nothing to compromise its historical worth: “To write the history of ‘popular’ culture does not mean that the common people in the past have importance only when they represent everyone else, or that one must always look only at normative behavior and find subjects who are just like their neighbors. Historians have long celebrated members of political and intellectual elites precisely because of their individuality.” 18 Schwartz seemed to be framing his project as one that, in telling the history of some people, aims to reveal more about the history of all people. Indeed, no one wants to think of oneself as amounting to nothing more than one’s membership in this or that social group. Schwartz’s remarks speak to the occasional misgivings possessed by those using diffuse sources. They are reassurance that just because the sources are different does not mean that they are completely distinct. They are all part of the same historical fabric. A wealth of sources allows one to return to their subject repeatedly over the course of a project to embroider it with new details and introduce new wrinkles.

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In reality, all conclusions are suggestions; some of them just appear more irrefutable than others. Like any other intriguing historical work, projects that draw on diffuse documentation open up endless possibilities for corroboration with projects in other fields and other disciplines. Validation may be delayed in coming, it if comes at all, and it may come from entirely nonacademic arenas. When Pestana’s reviewer states that her book “raises colonial conundrums but does not fully explore them, leaving ghostly wisps of unanswered questions in her wake,” it is probably meant as a criticism.19 However, I do not choose to read it as such. In my work so far with diffuse sources I have found that perhaps, like my three-year-old during a car ride, I am better at posing questions than having answers for them. But a good question can keep one occupied for an academic career—or at least a trip to the grocery store.

Notes 1. The “long nineteenth century” is generally considered to extend from 1780 to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. For an overview of works utilizing this periodization, see Pamela Murray, “Diverse Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Mexican History,” Latin American Research Review 32 (1997): 187–92. See also Jeremy Adelman “Latin American Longues Durées,” Latin American Research Review 39 (2004): 224; he has argued that in a broader sense “the longue durée is back” as an approach to Latin American history. 2. “Faculty Author Series: Jonathan Amith,” Gettysburg College, http://www. gettysburg.edu/podium/faculty_authors/amith/index.dot. 3. Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Toleration and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 6. 4. Henry C. Schmidt, “Toward the Innerscape of Mexican Historiology: Liberalism and the History of Ideas,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 8, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 119. This article is a review of three books: The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico by Charles A. Hale, Protestants and the Mexican Revolution: Missionaries, Ministers, and Social Change by Deborah J. Baldwin, and Los disidentes: Sociedades protestantes y revolución en México, 1872–1911 by Jean-Pierre Bastian. 5. Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 23. 6. On Sartorius’s advocacy of German immigration to Mexico, see Carl Sartorius, Importancia de México para la emigración alemaña á México, trans. Augustín S. de Tagle (Mexico City: Tip. del editor, ex-convento del Espiritu Santo, 1852).

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7. Karl B. Heller, Alone in Mexico: The Astonishing Travels of Karl Heller, 1845– 1848, trans. Terry Rugeley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 7. 8. Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Justicia, vol. 230, exp. 7, 32. 9. As local lawyer Josef Mariano Morales delicately worded it, Capetillo had a weakness for a “certain vice with women.” Biblioteca Postal 10-9528 D. 10. AGN, Correos Fomento, vol. 4, exp. 35, 139. 11. Andrea Robertson Cremer, “Review of Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World by Carla Gardina Pestana,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 2 (April 2010): 385. 12. Schmidt, “Toward the Innerscape,” 130. 13. Douglas Butterworth and John K. Chance, Latin American Urbanization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ix. 14. James E. Wadsworth, “Review of All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World by Stuart B. Schwartz,” Americas 67, no. 4 (April 2011): 557–58. 15. Cremer, “Review of Protestant Empire,” 385. 16. Wadsworth, “Review of All Can Be Saved,” 557–58. 17. Cremer, “Review of Protestant Empire,” 385. 18. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, 6–7. 19. Cremer, “Review of Protestant Empire,” 385.

Chapter 7

What’s in an Object

Plato, Aristotle, and the Virgin of Copacabana



Sean f. McEnroe

Colonial-era sculptures have focused the devotions of Latin Americans of all ethnicities and economic classes for centuries.1 Some of these sculptures are artistic masterworks, but others appear quite ordinary. Outsiders to Latin American Catholicism may find themselves staring at these santos (saints), scrutinizing them for some physical characteristic that might explain their cultural importance. When one gazes at sculptures of the Virgin Mary, this search is confounded by the typical concealment of the sculpture itself. In most cases, only the face and hands of Mary are visible. One knows that somewhere, buried beneath the layers of fabric, is a simple wooden form crafted long in the past. But the wigs, crowns, and garments— even the paint that defines her face—are often accretions added over time, right down to the present. These layers of paint, plaster, garments, and jewelry are an apt metaphor for the cultural meanings of devotional art in the context of a living and constantly evolving tradition.2 Our Lady of Copacabana is an image that confounds the viewer in this way. The sixteenth-century sculpture is shaped from wood but topped with a wig, dressed in robes, and adorned with paint, gold leaf, jewels, and a crown. She stands atop a rising crescent moon of gold and carries the infant Jesus in her arms. She is somewhat less than life-size, but her commanding position, high in a sculptural niche, lends a sense of majesty to the diminutive figure. Since 1583 Our Lady of Copacabana has been enshrined on the shores of Lake Titicaca, first in the local church, then in an Augustinian

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The Virgin of Copacabana photographed in 2013 after the widely publicized theft of her crown and jewels. Associated Press photo by Juan Karita, April 23, 2013, File 973023400900.

chapel, and finally in a dedicated basilica built under viceregal patronage. She is the patron saint of Bolivia but receives devoted pilgrims from all over the Andes and, indeed, from all over the world. Our Lady of Copacabana has meant different things to different people, but for her most important biographer, Augustinian friar Alonso Ramos Gavilán, the meaning of the site and object were bound up with long-standing theological debates about the relationship among objects, perception, and truth. The goal of this chapter is to see the Virgin through his eyes, working outward from the physical object and the narrative of its creation toward a broader understanding of its place in indigenous and European notions of Christianity. In order to do so, one must read the things that Ramos Gavilán read and also visualize the Peruvian and Bolivian landscapes that he inhabited. This exercise matters for our understanding not just of the Andes but also of the ties between regional and universal notions of Christianity. People like Ramos Gavilán were key cultural intermediaries between local and indigenous New World religion, on the one hand, and the rapidly evolving ideas about theology and praxis in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe, on the other.

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Map of the Lake Titicaca region showing Copacabana and the Isla del Sol. George Squier, Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas (New York: Harper, 1877), 330.

The sculpture itself was shaped in the early 1580s by Francisco Tito Yupanqui. He was a Quechua nobleman, educated and literate, and tied by family and social networks to the kurakas (Inca officials) of the highlands. His project was an arduous one. Learning the craft of image making, producing the sculpture, and overcoming opposition from innumerable local factions and authorities was exceedingly difficult, but Tito Yupanqui was ultimately successful. In the end the sculpture was venerated by the Church, embraced by Indian political leaders, and seized upon as the inspiration for new religious sodalities in Copacabana.3

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So how are we to interpret Tito Yupanqui’s quest? About four decades after the creation of the Virgin of Copacabana, Ramos Gavilán sought to answer this question in Historia del Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, originally published in 1621.4 This is a complex work whose long narrative of the site describes the ancient indigenous past, the conquest era, the story of the sculpture’s creation, the miracles attributed to it, the institutions built around it, and the pilgrimage traditions that followed. It also includes the testimony of the artist Tito Yupanqui. Ramos Gavilán makes clear from the outset that the story of Tito Yupanqui should be understood as an allegory of the human quest for spiritual knowledge. To make sense of this allegory, modern readers must immerse themselves in both the landscape of the colonial Andes and the theological writings that shaped Ramos Gavilán’s worldview. In many respects the real, living, breathing artist was reshaped by Ramos Gavilán as a character in his book; but the character was also a real man, and one who spoke for himself. Tito Yupanqui’s own account of how he made the famed image of the Virgin Mary occupies only a few pages of Historia del Santuario, but it has received more attention from scholars than the much larger work that surrounds it.5 To go beyond a simple reading, one must examine the sculpture in relation to the artist and consider the artist’s narrative in relation to Ramos Gavilán’s theology. Historia del Santuario is divided into three volumes: the first describes the religious and political history of the Copacabana region before Spanish conquest, the second describes the creation of Our Lady of Copacabana and the miracles attributed to her, and the third describes a novena (a nine-day cycle of prayers) intended for pilgrims to the site. The tripartite organization seems to mirror the three stages of human history described by St. Augustine’s Enchiridion: life before the law of God, life under the law of God, and life in a state of grace. The fourth stage in Augustine’s schema lies outside the material world and outside human history: the “perfect peace” at the end of time, and the redemption of the immortal soul.6 I suspect we are witnessing in Historia del Santuario an Augustinian intellectual integrating the history of the Andes into a global eschatology. The first volume describes Andeans initially untouched by God, then visited by magically transported apostles of Christ, and finally lured from the true path by the wiles of Satan and the snares of a false religion.7 During the

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age that followed, images of the cross and signs of the Virgin abounded, but the distortions of the devil prevented the Andeans from grasping their true meaning.8 The author repeatedly compared the preconquest Andes to the age of classical antiquity when philosophers struggled toward the light without the benefit of direct revelation. The second volume opens with a word to the wise: “Christ our Lord wished to say that the lazy sinner did not deserve to understand the secrets of the faith” and was left in confusion and darkness.9 Ramos Gavilán likened Inca temples to the Temple of Solomon and to the various temples of the Greeks and Romans. In all these ages men struggled to discern divine truth through “hieroglyphics, symbols, and figures wrapped in confusing emblems.” 10 Ramos Gavilán implied that human history is divisible into stages of understanding and that his book likewise reveals its message in distinct stages. Patient readers who study the book, go on a pilgrimage to Copacabana, and pray the novena will arrive at a true knowledge of the Virgin. The 1621 edition of the book opens and closes with poems by the author and by some of his admirers that attest to this very process of spiritual edification. Readers of Historia del Santuario are led on a journey through human history and given a pathway for personal redemption. First they experience the Andes’ preconquest past, superimposed on the age of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs (life before the law); then they travel through the era of conquest and conversion, superimposed on the story of Mosaic revelation (life under the law); and finally they are led on a pilgrimage to the feet of the Virgin of Copacabana (life under the Spirit of God). The reader’s experience ends with the novena, a nine-day ritual of prayer long associated in the Christian mind with the Pentacost and with the arrival of the Holy Spirit.11 At the center of the work is the story of the fashioning and reception of the Virgin of Copacabana. It is presented in two versions: the first in the authorial voice of Ramos Gavilán, and the second in the voice of the sculptor Tito Yupanqui.12 Ramos Gavilán introduced the writing of the Indian artist with a preamble on philosophy: “The desire to know is so fundamental in man that the prince of philosophy, in his Metaphysics, distinguished it as almost his true nature . . . all men are naturally inclined to want to know; and thus it is that many authors—keen to appeal to this passion—have tirelessly investigated many mysterious things, unsatisfied until they have brought to

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light whatever lay buried, unscrutinized, in perpetual silence.” 13 The reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics is explicit, but the reader soon encounters implicit references to Plato as well.14 Clearly Tito Yupanqui’s narrative is not to be read on its own but rather is to be interpreted in connection to classical works of philosophy.15 For Aristotle the role of the artist was to take transitory and specific physical materials and produce representations of forms that are immaterial and eternal. In Gavilán’s words, great artists, like great intellectuals, “brought to light” truths unseen. Like the hypothetical traveler in Plato’s Republic, these truth seekers struggled out of the shadow realm of earthly confusion and toward a more perfect apprehension of light and truth.16 Gavilán’s frequent association of light, truth, and Platonic logos would, of course, ring true for his readers; it is the language of the Gospel of John.17 But these associations also had a deep local resonance in Copacabana, where pilgrims once stopped on their journeys to the Isla del Sol and its temple, which then promoted the association among Inca unity, the natural order, and the solar creator god, Viracocha.18 Ramos Gavilan himself devoted numerous chapters to the sun cult, describing its religious and political qualities.19 The philosophical message of Historia del Santuario is best expressed in the chapters that describe the fashioning and reception of the image of Our Lady of Copacabana. The main narrative appears in the form of the text reportedly written by Tito Yupanqui and transmitted to Ramos Gavilán by the former’s brother, Don Felipe de León.20 The narrative and frame story closely resemble those found in Plato’s Republic and more recently in Thomas More’s Utopia—both of which were widely read by New World churchmen of the day.21 Ramos Gavilán seems to be reminding us to consult the classics before pressing on. The Republic begins with Socrates and Polemarchus walking home from a religious ritual. Their conversation eventually leads them back to the Polemarchus family home, where they discuss the relationship between earthly and spiritual things. At the heart of the Republic one finds the powerful and often revisited allegory on truth seeking and political life, in which a benighted cave dweller struggles upward into the light of the sun. Tito Yupanqui’s quest is presented to us as part of a work of philosophy in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and More. The meaning of the Virgin of Copacabana comes to us in a layered frame story: Tito Yupanqui’s memoir of its creation, wrapped in Ramos Gavilán’s larger history of the shrine and

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the region. Ramos Gavilán follows his reflection on Aristotle’s quest for truth with his introduction to the Tito Yupanqui document: “Wanting to play my part in so universal a quest, amid all that this kingdom offers, I wanted to know of the beginnings and true origin of the holy image of Copacabana. . . . While looking into things, I met the very brother of the sculptor who made her, and he handed me an account which the deceased had left.” 22 Beneath all these layers of the story, how are we to find the true message of the text? Like the statue itself, which at first appears all wig, crown, and robes, the “true” philosophical meaning of the Virgin of Copacabana is difficult to reach. Fortunately, Ramos Gavilán’s references to Aristotle’s Metaphysics offer us the right heuristic. In the Aristotelian tradition, when an artist fashions an image, there is both a tangible and an intangible outcome, the latter being more important. Human hands may create multitudes of imperfect images, but the accumulated experience brings humanity closer to understanding the ultimate spiritual forms they are meant to imitate. Aristotle has a lot to say about the proper role of art in the human search for wisdom. In Poetics he remarked that “the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation, he learns his earliest lessons. . . . Thus the reason men enjoy seeing a likeness is that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring.” 23 Viewed in this light, what matters most is the understanding produced by the Virgin of Copacabana, not the aesthetic object itself. Gavilán endorses a series of experiences and reflections linked to the sculpture that, like the Stations of the Cross or the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, offer a terrestrial path toward transcendent understanding.24 Ramos Gavilán first tells his readers that his writing is part of a quest for truth; he then presents Tito Yupanqui’s quest for a truer image of the Virgin. The latter is clearly told in service of the former. Tito Yupanqui and his brother begin their great undertaking by studying with one of the region’s master artists, Diego de Ortiz. It is the brother, Felipe de León, who comes up with a method of refining their vision. He suggests that, guided by prayer, they and other Indians should study the existing images of the Virgin before making their own image.25 The brothers follow the same path that Aristotle attributes to great artists: the systematic observation and comparison of

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flawed earthly instantiations in order to arrive at a nearer apprehension of the underlying universal form.26 The brothers’ subsequent efforts to sculpt the image are plagued by recurrent setbacks: three attempts to construct a model end in failure. After earnest prayer and a dedicated mass, a final attempt succeeds. But even after the rough shape of the Virgin is cast, it has to be painted, gilded, and clothed, then duly accepted by the local authorities. At each step the brothers are met with opposition: the bishop of Chuquisaca refuse them a license to sculpt and paint, Spaniards mock their image as the work of primitive Indians, and even their fellow Indians in Copacabana initially scorn their efforts.27 The story of the two brothers fits a classical script for describing the inquiries of a philosophical pilgrim. In the Apology Plato describes the exhaustive search for wisdom by Socrates as a tireless exercise. Socrates wanders the earth seeking one man who is truly wise. He tells his listeners, “I want you to think of my adventures as a kind of pilgrimage.” He interrogates politicians, poets, and craftsmen but finds them all lacking. Along the way, however, he remarks on the variety of ways in which artists touch upon truth. The poets and artists, he explains, cannot describe their transcendent work but seem to have produced it from “instinct or inspiration.” After provoking the anger of all sectors of local society, he concludes that “the truth of the matter, gentlemen, is pretty certainly this: that real wisdom is the property of God, and this oracle is his way of telling us that human wisdom has little or no value.” 28 The story of Tito Yupanqui is not so different. In his quest to produce the perfect statue, he consultes virtually every kind of local authority, secular and religious, Indian and Spanish. They all prove themselves unworthy, but like Socrates, Tito Yupanqui never presents himself as the final arbiter of truth. In fact, the artist scarcely claims credit for the image. It is instead represented as a miracle. What Plato and Ramos Gavilán’s writings express though dialogue and narrative, Aristole’s Metaphysics spells out more directly: “the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception whatever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the masterworker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive.”29 Aristotle is speaking here of artists and builders, although they are not the ultimate subject of his inquiry. Rather, he aims to show by analogy that just as the imperfect may derive from the

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perfect or the built from the builder, all things must originate from God.30 By asking his readers to consider the Virgin of Copacabana in relation to Aristotle, Ramos Gavilán is encouraging them to consider the relationship between a physical image and its spiritual prototype. Ramos Gavilán offers us Titu Yupanqui’s story as part of a larger discussion with the reader about the search for truth. This is a rational journey that starts with sense, then proceeds to speech, and ultimately to understanding. Socrates explains this process in Plato’s Republic. He begins by comparing the qualities of visible things but then suggested that we must reach beyond them: “You won’t be able to follow me any farther. . . . You would no longer see an image of what we are describing, but the truth itself.” This is, of course, the most important aspect of Plato that Augustinian Christianity seizes upon. The perceptible object, such as Titu Yupanqui’s sculpture, is not the ultimate objective of the artist or the intellectual. As Socrates says in the culmination of his argument, “Then isn’t this at last . . . the theme itself that dialectical discussion sings? It itself is intelligible. But the power of sight imitates it.” 31 It certainly appears that the narrative of the quest for the Virgin of Copabana was composed as part of a discussion about Christian neo-Platonism and the Aristotelian search for universals. But why would this discussion emerge in the 1580s and in relation to an Indian community in the high Andes? To answer this question, I think we need to consider the ways in which the religious life of the Andes, though geographically distant from Europe, still belonged to the same cultural moment and drew from many of the same sources. The mythic story of the Virgin of Copacabana should be considered both in reference to the early 1580s, when the sculpture was made, and to the 1620s, when the official story was penned. The final session of the Council of Trent adjourned just two decades before the creation of the Virgin of Copacabana. It drew the bishops of western Christendom together amid the great conflicts of the Reformation. The council was summoned both to answer the accusations of Lutherans and to more clearly define the boundaries of orthodoxy. One of its objectives was to refute the Protestant accusation that Catholic devotional images of saints were a form of idolatry. The defense of devotional imagery drew heavily on Platonic and Aristotelian arguments about the relationship between objects of perception and ultimate spiritual reality. The Council of Trent insisted

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that “the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honor and veneration are to be given them; not that any divinity, or virtue, is believed to be in them, on account of which they are to be worshipped; or that anything is to be asked of them; or, that trust is to be reposed in images, as was of old done by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols.” 32 In Europe, Catholic leaders were keenly aware of the need to defend their use of art and to distinguish it from idolatry even while constantly celebrating the early Church’s struggle against classical idolatry in the Mediterranean. At the same moment the Andean church was both exalting exemplary devotional art and rooting out “ancient idols,” in this case the huacas associated with the indigenous past.33 In the very same year that Francisco Tito Yupanqui approached the bishop of Chuquisaca, churchmen from the entire region convened for the Third Provincial Council of Lima. The council had many charges, but its most pressing policy questions treated the position of indigenous Andeans within the Church. The council urged a fuller inclusion of Indians in Christian ritual and institutional life, placing a particular emphasis on education in the faith. At the same time, the council renewed the call for the suppression of Indian idolatry—that is, the use of indigenous images in traditional religious practices.34 In other words, Tito Yupanqui shaped his image of Mary at the very moment that the Andean clergy was intently focused on teaching the indigenous people to renounce their traditional images and to regard Christian images in precisely the right way. If these issues were in play when the image was shaped, they were even more pressing when the story of the object was committed to writing. In 1620 or 1621, when Historia del Santuario was written, the Andean church was engaged in the first major campaign to suppress indigenous religious practices. This campaign for the extirpation of idolatry devoured the energies of the Church from 1609 to 1622 under the direction of Archbishop Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero. It had begun with the discovery of secret unorthodox practices in the province of Huarochirí, but it soon snowballed into a vast regional investigation.35 Although the most vigorous investigations took place in the Archdiocese of Lima, reactions to the event continued to shape Church policy throughout South America for the next century. In the same year that Alonso Ramos Gavilán published his history of Copacabana, Jesuit leader

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Pablo José de Arriaga published Extirpacíon de la idolatría del Peru, a guide to investigations of Indian apostasy.36 Together, the two works encapsulated the Andean church’s position on licit and illicit images. Both Ramos Gavilán and Arriaga took a subtle position on the Indian practice of Christianity. The Church policy of the era was heavily focused on rooting out the surviving vestiges of indigenous religion, and both men had a stake in this project, yet neither disparaged the role of Indians in the Church—far from it. In fact, Arriaga was both a leading figure in the investigations of Indian religious apostasy and a seminal figure in the education of a new indigenous elite for the Andean church.37 Just three years before the publication of Extirpación, Arriaga threw his weight behind Jesuit efforts to create a new generation of indigenous leaders by founding two new colleges for the sons of caciques, one in Cuzco and the other in Lima. These institutions drew from ruling families throughout the region and aimed to send the young noblemen back to their home communities as exemplars of Christian orthodoxy and leaders within the local church and state apparatus.38 Along with their fellow Jesuits and Augustinians, Ramos Gavilán and Arriaga sought to destroy the traces of pre-Christian idolatry and rebuild in their place a new indigenous Christian society—a society without pagan idols, but also free of the Protestant iconoclasm then ravaging Europe. Many of the most venerated images in Latin American Catholicism date from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, an era when European religious culture was redefined by resurgent Renaissance classicism, the evangelization of the Americas, and the great theological debates of the Reformation. At that time the value and meaning of religious art were hotly contested. We should never assume that American missionaries and indigenous intellectuals were untouched by these debates in the global Christian community. This period witnessed a rapid expansion in print culture, in the global social networks of missionary orders, and in the transcultural educational opportunities afforded to indigenous elites. For all these reasons, it is just as important to place the story of the Virgin of Copacabana in this global intellectual context as it is to understand her within the specific ethnographic context of the town and region.39 In the end, the clothes the Virgin is wrapped in, the story of her origins, the landscape that surrounds her, and miracles attributed to her mean far more than the simple figure itself. She is at the center of a symbolic system

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Shrine of Our Lady of Copacabana as it appeared in the nineteenth century. George Squier, Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas (New York: Harper, 1877), 319.

with multiple authors. Our Lady of Copacabana is in some ways a maternal goddess reinhabiting a sacred pilgrimage landscape from the preconquest era: she ties Aymaras to Quechuas and links both to Europeans. She signifies the Christian triumph over indigenous religion but simultaneously celebrates indigenous cultural survival. Her sculptor, both humble and triumphant, vindicates the role of Indian spiritual leadership within Andean Christianity, and her biographer, Alonso Ramos Gavilán, makes her an allegory for the triumph of neo-Platonic philosophy and of Tridentine orthodoxy amid the dangers of resurgent Indian paganism and Lutheran iconoclasm.

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Notes 1. William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). 2. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 79–84; Verónica Salles-Reese, From Viracocha to the Virgin of Copacabana (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). 3. Mercedes del Río, “De Sacerdotes del Tawantinsuyu a Cofrades Coloniales,” Revista Andina 49 (2009): 9–69; Luisa Elena Alcala, “Beginnings: Art, Time, and Tito Yupanqui’s Virgin of Copacabana,” in The Arts of South America 1492–1850, ed. Donna Pierce (Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2010), 157. My thanks to Susan Deans-Smith for a helpful conversation on artists’ workshops. 4. Alonso Ramos Gavilán, Historia del Santuario del Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, ed. Ignacio Prado Pastor (Lima, Peru: P. L. Villanueva, 1988), vols. 1–3. 5. Ibid., 2:234–38. 6. Saint Augustine’s Enchiridion, trans. Ernest Evans (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1953), 102–3. 7. Ramos Gavilán, Historia del Santuario, vol. 1, chaps. 7–8. 8. Ibid., vol. 1, chap. 9. 9. Ibid., 2:205; translation mine. 10. Ibid., 2:206–7. 11. My thanks to William B. Taylor for a recent discussion about the tradition of novenas. The association among novenas, the Age of the Holy Spirit, and the Pentacost derives from Acts 1:14 and is formally articulated in the 1897 papal encyclical, Divinum Illud Munus. 12. For excerpts of the narrative, see Salles-Reese, From Viracocha, 177–81; and Kenneth Mills, “Making an Image and a Shrine,” in Colonial Latin America: A Documentary Reader, ed. Kenneth R. Mills, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 167–72. Salles-Reese omitted the introduction from Ramos Gavilán, obscuring his intent. See Ramos Gavilán, Historia del Santuario, 2:234–37. 13. Translation from Mills, “Making an Image,” 169; all other translations of Ramos Gavilán, unless noted, are mine. 14. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1553: “All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.”

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15. There are multiple cases of intertextuality in Ramos Gavilán’s work, not all classical. Several miracle stories derive from European models. Carlos Gálvez Peña, “Un milagro flamenco en los Andes,” in Palabra e imagen en Hispanoamérica, ed. Cecile Michaud (Lima, Peru: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2015), 65–91. 16. Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Cambridge, UK: Hackett, 2004), bk. 7. 17. “In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him. . . . What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:1–5, New Revised Standard Version). 18. Sabine MacCormack, “From the Sun of the Incas to the Virgin of Copacabana,” Representations, no. 8 (Fall 1984): 30–60; Salles-Reese, From Viracocha, chap. 2; Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition, 38–41. 19. Ramos Gavilán, Historia del Santuario, 1:18, 26. 20. This may be a literary device, like the letters contained in Thomas More’s Utopia. Salles-Reese, From Viracocha, 177, considered it authentic, noting its distinct style and Quechua-influenced syntax. Regardless, the embedded story is deployed by Gavilán to express the objectives of his larger work. Alcala, “Beginnings,” 154–57, noted that Ramos Gavilán’s secondary narrative emphasizes the artist’s determination and goal. 21. Silvio Zavala, La Utopía de Tomás Moro en la Nueva España (Mexico City: Biblioteca Histórica Mexicana, 1937); Silvio Zavala, Recuerdos de Vasco de Quiroga (Mexico City: Porrua, 1965); Bernardino Verástique, Michoacán and Eden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 113–17. 22. Translation from Mills, “Making an Image,” 167. 23. Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 4:55. 24. Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15–64, 110–204. 25. Ramos Gavilán, Historia del Santuario, 2:235. 26. Robert Pasnau, “The Latin Aristotle,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle, ed. Christopher Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 666–85. 27. Ramos Gavilán, Historia del Santuario, 2:236. 28. Plato, Apology, in The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (New York: Penguin, 1969), 51–52. 29. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 251-275 30. This idea was embedded in the thinking of men like Ramos Gavilán through Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, which applies its logic to Christian divinity. 31. Plato, Republic, 1:27–28. 32. J. Waterworth, ed., “Twenty-Fifth Session,” in The Council of Trent: Canons and Decrees (Chicago: 1848), 235.

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33. Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), chap. 6. 34. Los Concilios Limenses en la Evangelización Latinoamericana (Pamplona, Spain: Universidad de Navarra, 1990), chap. 8; Claudia Brosseder, The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Colonial World of Andean Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). 35. Kenneth Andrien, Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness under Spanish Rule, 1532–1825 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 171–84. 36. Pablo José de Arriaga, The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru, trans. Clark Keating (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1968). See also Priyah Shah, “Language, Discipline, and Power,” Voces Novae 4, no. 1 (2013): 102–24. 37. Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, “From Apprentices to ‘Famous Brushes’: Native Artists in Colonial Peru,” in Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, ed. Ilona Katzew (Los Angeles: LA County Museum of Art, 2012), 203–25. 38. Monique Alperrine-Boyer, “Enseñanza y pedagogía de los Jesuitas en los colegios para los hijos de caciques (siglo xvii),” in Los Jesuitas y la Modernidad en Iberoamérica, 1549–1573, ed. Manuel Marzal and Luis Bacigualpo (Lima, Peru: Instituto Frances de Estudios Andinos, 2007), 270–98. 39. Thomas Cummins, “The Indulgent Image: Prints in the New World,” in Katzew, Contested Visions, 200–23; William B. Taylor, “Religious Prints and their Uses,” paper presented at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, October 4, 2014. On the circulation of classical imagery, see Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and David Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). On indigenous literacy, see Alperrine-Boyer, “Enseñanza y pedagogía”; on indigenous intellectuals, see Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, eds., Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); and David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chaps. 12–16.

Chapter 8

Thinking at the Margins

Subalterns and the Spanish American Past Kristin Huffine

Students of syncretism in Europe have understood more clearly that a given combination of Christian and “pagan” elements was inherently transitional and incomplete, a mixture or combination more than a fusion. It was not, in itself, a synthesis of religions or a selective assimilation of one religion by another, but part of an incomplete process that might be reversed or redirected and could not be measured by traits added or subtracted. — William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico



Like William Taylor’s study of syncretism, the examination of Latin American colonial subject formation is an evaluation of how New World subalterns came to be thinking, acting Christian subjects under Spanish colonial rule. More specifically, it is an investigation into intellectual change, an effort to point to the moments in which subaltern reasoning was undone by new forms of colonial thinking while also documenting how new structures of subaltern knowledge were erected in their place. The study of colonial subject formation does not aim to locate authentic knowledge from a precontact past. Nor does it demarcate a point of monolithic transformation. Instead it is an attempt to document the processes of thinking that emerged in a new colonial context, novel processes introduced by colonizing powers that were mediated and transformed by colonial subjects. As epistemological

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transformations that emerge with the introduction of new cultures, vocabularies, work regimes, and ways of thinking, colonial subject formation was a phenomenon that usually appeared in a way that was impermanent, transitional, or incomplete. Hunting for this mediated divide and inherently transitional mode of thinking can bring rich historical analysis to studies of colonial Latin America. This chapter examines ways to construct cultural histories of subalterns that emphasize the mediated and transitional nature of colonial subject formation in the Spanish American past.1 One of the best places to find accounts of colonial subject formation is in documents on the Church, and especially in mission or indigenous-parish records. The Franciscan Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco and later Jesuit missions in Juli and Río de la Plata, in the Viceroyalty of Peru, established education for young Native men with the aim of producing Christian subjects. In Tlatelolco the school was built on the site of the Nahua calmecac (an Aztec school that prepared the sons of nobles to be priests and chiefs) and was designed for educating indigenous men for the Catholic priesthood.2 In this school and in Juli and Río de la Plata, missionaries were dedicated to producing Christian subjects, young men whom they imagined would hold a deep belief in the principles of the faith. Unlike the first Franciscans, who arrived before the school was established in 1536, Jesuit and later Franciscan arrivals in New Spain and Peru wanted to produce students who went beyond a cursory understanding of the Bible and Catholic tradition. They wanted their catechumens to become thinking, acting Christian subjects who could internalize Catholic knowledge and reproduce that learning in their own arguments, thoughts, and words. A Nahua or Aymara Christian subject was to be fully dedicated to what the missionaries defined as orthodox belief. Training to be catechists and assistants, to help with the maintenance of Christian communities in America as well as indigenous elites fluent in the faith, these indigenous Christian subjects were perceived by the missionaries as the vanguard of the New World’s Catholic faith. Although reasoning and critical thinking were advanced as processes central to the project of Christianization, these methods of learning also introduced individualized thoughts, strategies, and categories of analysis for understanding the tenets of the faith. Operating in a world with indigenous parentage and ties to kinship groups and Spanish missionary leadership,

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Nahua, Aymara, and other Native Christian subjects understood the value and social currency of Christian learning but also carried with them the ideas and epistemological structures that shaped their changing, postcontact indigenous culture. Because of this, missionaries found themselves in the difficult position of pressing for individual learning and finding creative, unconventional, and sometimes heterodox belief.3 Sometimes expressed in agreement and other times in conflict and misunderstanding, these dialogues of confusion, misapprehension, and partial understanding of the faith contain some of the most interesting historical material for the study of colonial religion. For historians of the colonial Latin American church, the changing dynamic of local religious thought often provides the most accurate evidence for understanding indigenous forms of colonial subject formation. To study Native Christian subject formation in a specific local context, it is best to examine multiple kinds of sources. Catechisms, missionary reports, grammar books, and sermons help establish a pedagogical and spiritual framework within which to measure and assess the responses of Native Christian subjects. These responses can sometimes help document individual and communal constructions of faith and belief. They can also help frame problems and misunderstandings that surface in catechetical dialogue. Questions asked by missionaries point to problems they identified with indigenous behavior, ritual, or faith and provide opportunities for interpreting the thinking that might have produced the confusion or conflict. Native correspondence with colonial administrators, court magistrates, and the Crown is a useful record for documenting Native motivations in the past. Letters and reports reveal specific indigenous interests, but they can also help in uncovering rhetorical traditions, Native-Christian categories of analysis, and commentary suggesting the development of communities of belief. Mission art and artisanship help with evaluating indigenous traditions of painting and iconography, while studies of material culture aid in establishing pre- and postcontact artistic traditions and conditions of communal life. Applying art historical and archaeological methods of interpretation and analysis to artwork and artisanship in a given Latin American context can help with generating ideas and documenting evidence in both speculative and affirmative ways.4 To this end, art historian Carolyn Dean studied paintings of Corpus Christi processions in sixteenth-century Peru and argued that Andean

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dances and processions carried with them indigenous expressions of faith that communicated alternative forms of colonial knowledge production to an Andean audience.5 Paintings, murals, sculptures of saints, and other iconography are sources that can help shed light on subaltern religious thought and ritual. The study of indigenous mission printing, woodworking, and other forms of artisanship can also yield information about professional artistry, work regimens, and chronologies of Christian instruction. Although these bits of information are usually inconclusive on their own, when evaluated with archival documents and writings from the period, they can produce interesting speculative and determinative assertions about the subaltern past. Examinations of religious knowledge and expressions of faith open up one way of studying colonial subject formation. Investigations into colonial healing traditions provide another way to examine African and indigenous subject formation in the Spanish colonies. Herbals, medical treatises, and missionary accounts of shamanistic medicine shed light on American and African herbal and therapeutic traditions as well as on the creative cultural exchanges that defined colonial medicine in America. Though few in number, the herbal and medicinal studies by African and indigenous healers that contributed to the American and European canon of scientific study reveal complex arrangements of traditional medical knowledge as well as creative appropriations from the European pharmacopeia and medicinal traditions. Susan Scott Parrish brought to light the work of Kwasímu Kámba of Tjedú, a freed slave in colonial Suriname, to demonstrate how Carolus Linnaeus’s eighteenth-century efforts with classification depended on the contributions of displaced African and indigenous informants.6 James Sweet wrote about another manumitted slave, Domingos Álvares of Brazil, who bought his freedom from the money he made as a healer in Rio de Janeiro.7 New studies of colonial healers, shamans, and medicinal informants will open up possibilities for studying African and indigenous knowledge production and the circulation of the early modern Atlantic world learning that linked Europe and Africa to the Americas. They might also reveal how early modern shamans and botanical guides learned to manipulate European scientific knowledge networks and the racial boundaries of colonial medical practice so they might garner cultural and political authority and earn money as healers and doctors in America. Herbals are especially rich sources of indigenous knowledge that have

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attracted significant scholarly attention for how they figured into preColumbian traditions and some attention for how they were appropriated by European medical and scientific knowledge production. Very few scholars, however, have studied the Codex de la Cruz Badiano, the Materia medica of Francisco Hernández or Pedro de Montenegro, and other examinations of American healing traditions in terms of colonial subject formation; that is, very few have documented how indigenous authors and informants took up European forms of learning to produce complex arrangements of American knowledge that could have been made possible only by their colonial context.8 Although only a few exist in published form and in national archives and libraries in Mexico, South America, and Spain, they have the potential to yield at least a few in-depth analyses of subaltern thinking about healing, scientific and medical knowledge networks, and the colonial politics of practicing medicine in America. In addition to herbals, medical treatises, and missionary collections of indigenous and African medical knowledge, court testimonies bring to light healing and medical traditions carried out by subaltern practitioners in colonial Latin America. Sorcery and blasphemy cases in particular offer testimonies describing African, casta (mixed-race), and indigenous medical practices and document the ways that subalterns used the vocabulary and cultural capital of European medical science along with American and traditional African therapeutic traditions for their own professional ends.9 Investigating subaltern testimonies before the Inquisition and ecclesiastic courts reveals ways that Natives and castas learned to manipulate the language of medical and juridical knowledge to defend themselves from legal charges.10 Superstition cases, some of the most numerous crimes found in the Inquisition archives, include proceedings against African and casta healers practicing in New Spain and Peru, and ecclesiastical records include proceedings against Natives charged with sorcery and idolatry in the colonies. Further evaluation of sorcery and blasphemy cases in Mexico, Peru, and the borderland regions of the Spanish empire can open up opportunities for finding testimonials of subaltern medicinal and legal knowledge. Included in them are opportunities for documenting individual subalterns and negotiations of power as well as documentation that might establish alternative trajectories of power requiring knowledge networks and traditions of healing that were established within African, casta, and Native communities.11

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Continued work with subaltern testimonies in Inquisition and ecclesiastic legal records will no doubt reveal further African, indigenous, and mixedrace medicinal knowledge as well as efforts to negotiate colonial medical practice and the sanctioned authority of Spanish imperial science.12 Finally and perhaps most important to the evaluation of subaltern knowledge and colonial subject formation is to stay true to the documentary evidence. Postcolonial theoretical studies of Natives, castas, and Afro-Latin Americans can sometimes support overzealous claims about the past. Often, however, it is better for authors to demonstrate the strength of individuality in subaltern knowledge. Subalterns are not a coherent group that acts unilaterally or in uniform fashion. They appear as individuals and in groups, as authors and analfabetos (people who were unable to read), as insurgents, and as ordinary recipients of patronage and hegemonic knowledge. The study of subalterns turns up multiple forms of knowledge, agency, and subject formation that are often best defined not with exceptional claims and dramatic narratives but by the ordinary and quotidian nature of their appearance in documents, artwork, artisanship, and texts. Preserving these subtleties will in many cases reveal what is most interesting and unique about individual subalterns and will also stay true to the historical record. When one documents the distinctive and unique character of colonial subject formation, then, it is often important to use measured language in assertions about what is found. Frequently the limited sources documenting subaltern actions, motivations, and knowledge suggest possibilities and conjectures rather than affirmations of clarity and coherent fact. Claims that articulate suppositions or conjectures are often more accurate and appropriate to analyses of events and conditions of the past. Rather than ambitious declarations of power and agency, suggestions are often the better and more accurate means for documenting the social practices, categories of analysis, and identities shaped by colonial subject formation. It is therefore helpful to be sparing and to employ the creativity of suggestion along with the rigor of analytical restraint. Rather than insisting that sources provide the full picture or tell the entire truth, offer alternative possibilities for interpreting the past, and make assertions that are powerfully logical analyses of these proposed conditions. Looking for the rich possibility of suggestion while refusing to overreach is what defines the power and creativity of subaltern studies in colonial Latin America.

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Notes 1. My understanding of colonial subject formation comes from postcolonial theory, especially John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), vol. 2; and Ann Stoler, “The Education of Desire and the Repressive Hypothesis,” in Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 165–95. Michel Foucault’s understanding of power, knowledge, and subjectivity are at the heart of most postcolonial theorists’ efforts to analyze colonial subjectivity. For his best accounts of subjectobject relations, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977). See also Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 78–108. Also important in my own study of subject formation is the notion of interpellation found in Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays, ed. Frederic Jameson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 11–44 . The idea that subjects are interpellated by or called to knowledge is crucial to understanding how colonial subjects mediate and participate in knowledge production. For a formulation of hegemony that helps explain how knowledge was collectively produced by state subjects and the dominant culture, see Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), vol. 1. 2. Although the school was founded as a seminary for the indigenous priesthood in 1533, no student there ever became a Catholic priest. The Crown banned Natives from ordination to the priesthood by 1555. 3. The best works that address the conflicts and misunderstanding that emerged in the context of catechetical instruction are Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Inga Clendinnen, “Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán,” Past and Present 94 (1982): 27–49. See also Inga Clendinnen, “Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing Religion in Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” History and Anthropology 5 (1990): 105–41; William B. Taylor, “Trouble with Miracles: An Episode in the Culture and Politics of Wonder in Colonial Mexico,” Politics and Reformations, Histories and Reformations: Essays in Honor of Thomas Brady Jr., ed. Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2007), 441–58; William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Louise M. Burkhart, “Satan Is My Nickname: Demonic and Angelic Interventions in Colonial Nahuatl Theater,” in Angels, Demons, and the New World, ed. Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden (Cambridge,

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7. 8.

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UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 101–25; Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); and Louise M. Burkhart, “Moral Deviance in Sixteenth-Century Nahua and Christian Thought: The Rabbit and the Deer” Journal of Latin American Lore 12, no. 2 (1986): 107–39. For an examination of the use of cartography, pictorial histories, codices, and other nonwritten sources to study subalterns in colonial Latin America, see Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo, Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). On how Andeans received, maintained, and subverted Spanish conventions of literacy in writing and expanded literacy to include verbal expression, painting, gestures, and urban design, see Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). See also Thomas B. F. Cummins, Emily Engel, Barbara Anderson, and Juan Ossio, eds., Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015). Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Dean examines sixteenth-century Corpus Christi celebrations to study Andean-Christian understandings of the body of Christ and Spanish festive culture in colonial Peru. Examining the complexity of knowledge conveyed by indigenous performative culture, Dean argues that Andeans understood and participated in Corpus Christi in Andean ways and that their dances and processions carried with them multiple indigenous expressions of faith that communicated alternative forms of colonial knowledge production. In Corpus Christi celebrations, indigenous confraternities and parishes celebrated the Catholic sacrament within the complex taki dances prescribed by the Spanish authorities. Kwasímu’s discovery that the Quassia amara root stimulates appetite and improves digestion can be found in Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1–23. James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Although ethnobotanical and anthropological studies of indigenous Mexican medicine have been multitudinous, the best studies that focused on preColumbian traditions are the following: Carlos Viesca Treviño, Medicina prehispánica de México: El conocimiento medico de los nahuas (Mexico City: Panorama Editorial, 1986); Carlos Viesca Treviño, “El corazón y sus enfermadades en la cultura náhuatl prehispánica,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 36, (2005): 226–44; Alfredo López Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideología: las concepciones de los antiguos nahuas (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónomia

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de México, 1984), vol. 1. On the European uses of American products of nature, see Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Antonio Barrera, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); María Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Daniela Bleichmar Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). For an especially nuanced approach to the study of Nahua-Spanish knowledge production, see Millie Gimmel, “Reading Medicine in the Codex de la Cruz Badiano,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (April 2008): 169–92. José María López Piñero, José Luis Fresquet Febrer, and Paula Susan DeVos have also published articles on Spanish and Creole uses of American pharmacological knowledge. For an examination of how Africans, castas, and Natives deployed sociomedical knowledge and classifications to define their own therapeutic practices and cultural knowledge of healing in colonial New Spain, see Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). On how black, Mayan, and mixed-race female healers opened up opportunities of cultural authority and power with local sorcery, magic, and curing practices, see Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Natives were not tried by the Inquisition’s courts. They did, however, go before ecclesiastical tribunals when accused of sorcery or idolatry. They also appeared as witnesses in Inquisition cases. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors, studies Natives in both capacities. Ibid.; Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Mixtec, Zapotec, and Nahua court officials used Spanish legal conventions to support local indigenous communities in colonial Oaxaca. Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Native intellectuals used cartography, lineage, translations, historical codices, and legal and religious knowledge production to engage with Spaniards and establish their own authority in the colonial order.

Part 3 Envisioning Histories

Chapter 9

Telling Stories of Continuity and Change



José Refugio de la Torre Curiel

Continuity and change: How should our historical narratives address these two processes when we analyze the evolution of human societies over time? What kind of response can we offer to one-sided perspectives that suggest history is mainly about either change or continuity? These questions have always been at the core of the historian’s craft, linked to ongoing discussions on human historicity, the end of history, and ideas of progress embedded in contrasting philosophies of history—from Aristotle to post-Marxist scholars, as advocates of theory of history such as Agnes Heller have shown.1 The coexistence of change and persistence in any given context, however, has been commonly assessed from a one-sided perspective that understands human history as the history of change or that emphasizes the hunt for evidence of the rebirth and new activation of practices and ideas associated with the past.2 Of course, recognizing historical time as a result of change and continuity is commonplace, if not a truism or a tautology among historians; however, arguing that one category should determine the way its counterpart takes place in historical narration, or merely suggesting that both of them should equally structure our interpretation of the past, does not always work as an appropriate hermeneutical tool—or, at least, does not suffice to take us beyond the rationale of common sense.3 Thus, if change and continuity have to be addressed by historians, how much should each category shape the way

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we think about research? Should we assume one process elicits the other? Can we think about these concepts outside dialectic propositions? Instead of offering a single answer to these questions, this chapter aims to illustrate that approaching the problem of change and continuity in history from a perspective of multiple interactions might not only highlight material evidence of either process, it might also illuminate the reasons for and the significance of conflict, overlap, convergence, or complementarity. Thinking in this way means departing from an essentialist framework in which persistence or change of individual forms is interpreted as the dominant feature of historical process. Take, for instance, Phillipe Walter’s study on pagan traditions and Christianity in medieval Europe.4 Walter’s interest in the continuities between pagan rituals and Christian holidays and hagiographies leads him to conclude that medieval European religiosity is primarily of pagan inspiration; thus, the Christmas tree and St. Patrick are two examples of how pagan rituals persisted in the Christian calendar, associated with a new religion that structured a new message on the basis of ancient symbols that remained barely altered in content and form. This example serves as a reminder that any attempt to combine change and persistence in historical analysis requires transcending a simplistic “both of them” or “either one” approach, which might suggest merely naming elements that change or remain apparently unaltered in a given social setting. As William Taylor would point out, analyzing human societies over time is not about applying fixed or absolute categories to historical realities, especially if we aim to think of them in comprehensive terms.5 Capturing glimpses of the past in synoptic ways means being alert to how different elements are brought together in complex processes that help societies to cope with the challenges—discrete or abrupt—of their time. Thus, innovations in human interaction might represent significant departures from the past, but they often mean effective ways “to maintain the familiar,” as Taylor showed in his study on religious change and parishioners’ religious practices in colonial Mexico.6 Human experience is not a summary of individual episodes (changes and continuities, in this case) or the succession of choices over time (modifying or preserving an order of things); it is the weaving, unspinning, and continuous remaking of a web of interconnected processes. How, then, can we

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approach these processes in a nonessentialist way? A starting point might be considering that change and continuity do occur in history as interchangeable areas of human choice; in that respect, the historian’s challenge is to explain how these choices occur, what their meaning and transcendence is, and what their proper contexts are. Instead of looking for evidences of permanence and the survival of old traits, we should analyze the “threads of continuity” through which “change is structured” by individuals.7 Aiming to illustrate the complexity of these premises while retracing some of my own steps in addressing the issues of continuity and change in previous research projects, this chapter focuses on the ways in which these categories interweave, using as an example the story of the cult of the Immaculate Conception in Zapopan, Mexico, from colonial times to the present. As this case shows, the researcher might benefit from focusing on additions to the formal elements of the cult changes in the calendar, on the incorporation of new titles and symbolic content for the image of the Virgin, or on the detection of reminiscences of previous traditions; however, beyond the task of formal identification, a richer perspective of social practice might be attained by asking how individuals make sense of their own experience by incorporating, reinventing, or keeping old and new cultural traits. Before I introduce the particulars of this case, some remarks are necessary to understand its context. To begin with, we are dealing with an image of the Immaculate Conception presented to local Indians in Zapopan by a Franciscan missionary in the sixteenth century. Nearly a century later, diocesan authorities from Guadalajara decided to replace the cult of that image (whose feast day is December 8), associating it instead with the feast of the Expectation of the Virgin Mary (December 18). This shift was apparently accepted by the image’s devotees, and the new feast became one of the major religious celebrations in Zapopan. Although a new name and feast day were adopted for this devotion, the local forms of approaching the image remained almost unaltered and helped to strengthen the links between the image and her new and more distant devotees. Assessing the ways in which each process overlapped or complemented the other requires an understanding of what had changed and what was preserved as well as the meanings of such circumstances. In this respect I realized I needed to ask how conscious the individuals involved in such processes were about being agents of change and continuity. Moreover, I

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wondered if bottom-up processes of continuity and change were inherently different from top-down initiatives. Finally, I needed to understand whether things that appeared on the exterior to be transformations or persistence were, in fact, processes of change and continuity in their substance. The following pages offer a story that condenses these reflections. I have tried to keep in mind that beyond the search for differences and displacements, or evidence of “one system competing with another, as a contest with one winner,” such an endeavor means being alert to “areas of continuity, congruence, and [also] missed understandings.” 8

Transforming Local Devotions: The Immaculist Cult in Zapopan In 1654 Juan Ruiz Colmenero, the bishop of Guadalajara in New Spain (1648– 1663), trusted Diego de Herrera, a diocesan priest in Zapopan (then a small Indian town a couple of miles west of Guadalajara) with a thorough investigation of the miracles attributed to the renowned image of the Virgin Mary hosted in that parish.9 According to local tradition, the image had been taken to Nueva Galicia by Fray Antonio de Segovia, one of the Franciscans preaching in that region.10 Segovia gave the image to a group of Indians from Jalostotitlán who had been congregated by Nicolás Bobadilla in 1540 in what came to be known as Zapopan. This image was said to have been used by the Franciscans to persuade rebel Indians to cease war against Spanish forces during the Mixtón War (1542), which led to the image being granted the title of the Pacifier.11 The image was a representation of the Purísima Concepción (Immaculate Conception) and resembled the images that Segovia left in San Juan de los Lagos and Atlixtac (present-day Santa Anita) on the outskirts of Guadalajara. The cult of the Immaculate Conception of Mary was a central component of Franciscan preaching efforts—at least since 1261, when they officially declared their commitment to celebrating this festival.12 In western New Spain the Immaculate Conception played a preeminent role in the early evangelization of local Indians, which can be seen in the hospitals founded by Fray Juan de San Miguel and other Franciscans in Michoacán and other regions. Most of these places “were served by the brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception, to which all the Indians belonged if they wished so.” 13 By 1600 a diocesan clergy had replaced the Franciscan missionaries in

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Zapopan, but the image remained among the local Indians. According to Diego de Herrera’s account, in the following decades the image had worked several miracles among their devotees, yet the Indians did not report any of them because they were afraid they might be deprived of their patroness if the news of those marvels were known elsewhere. In his testimony, dated July 1654, Herrera argued that in an earlier unknown time the image had been associated with the feast of the Expectation of the Virgin Mary. In fact, he declared that the feast had actually shifted (“se mudó la [ad]vocación”) from the Immaculate Conception to the Expectation, although “it is not known, and cannot be discerned, when and why” such a change had occurred. This obscure reference casts doubts on Herrera’s explanation of why members of an Indian parish in Nueva Galicia had apparently moved away from a specific way of approaching the Virgin Mary and Catholicism to embrace a cult that had just recently gained momentum in parts of Spain.14 It is not clear if Herrera adapted this argument to Bishop Ruiz Colmenero’s desire to promote the cult of the Immaculate Conception in Guadalajara’s cathedral (the bishop’s episcopal see) or if Herrera had already started to assimilate Zapopan’s image of the Virgin Mary to the cult of the Expectation before the bishop decided to reserve for the diocesan see the feast of the neighboring Indian parish. What emerges from the historical record is the convergence of Herrera’s opinion in favor of the enshrinement of the Expectation feast in Zapopan and the bishop’s commitment to the promotion of the cult of the Virgin Mary in the diocese of Guadalajara, especially in the three largest sanctuaries in western Mexico: Talpa, San Juan de los Lagos, and Zapopan.15 In 1655, shortly after Herrera had concluded his report, Ruiz Colmenero declared the image of Zapopan to be a reminder of the Expectation of the Virgin Mary, which formally displaced the cult of the Immaculate Conception in Zapopan. The bishop wanted his flock to identify the old image with a different commemoration, which naturally raises questions about religious practice at the local level. What did the devotees see in the image they had known for generations in their local church? Did the bishop’s decree affect the way they approached the image? Did the subtle distinction between the Expectation and the Immaculate Conception make any sense for local devotees? Did this debate over external references modify the practices relating

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to the essential comprehension of the roles of the Virgin? Brian Larkin and William Taylor have suggested that local religion was about institutional directives as much as it was about the practitioners’ understanding of effective ways of approaching the sacred.16 In that sense Ruiz Colmenero’s decrees regarding the Virgin of Zapopan may suggest a strong campaign “to direct local religious practices into orthodox channels,” but they might tell little about the forms in which this cult evolved during the remainder of the colonial period.17 Conventional renderings of this story establish that Ruiz Colmenero “wanted to move the feast of Our Lady of Zapopan from December 8 to [December] 23 so that he could attend the celebration in person,” because he commemorated the Immaculate Conception in the cathedral on the first of these dates and could not make the trip to Zapopan.18 In addition to this change, Ruiz Colmenero declared the diocese’s official recognition and commemoration of the mystery of the Immaculate Conception.19 A couple of decades later, Bishop Santiago de León Garabito (1678–1695) asked the Jesuit priest Francisco de Florencia to document the miracles related to the images of San Juan de los Lagos and Zapopan. Completed in 1694, Florencia’s chronicle of the largest sanctuaries in Nueva Galicia described, in the case of Zapopan, “an image of the Virgin [Mary] in pregnancy, in Expectation of the sacred birth.” In the case of San Juan de los Lagos, in contrast, he described a representation of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin.20 Thus, this historical account on the sanctuary of Our Lady of Zapopan, meant to be an effective aid in the promotion of Marian devotions throughout New Spain, inaugurated a shift in how the image’s attributes were interpreted.21 However, if the official discourse indicated a clear breakthrough in form and content, the local practices in Zapopan offered a different picture, because devotion to the Immaculate Conception did not cease in the context of the episcopal promotion of the new Marian cult. Moreover, devotion to the Virgin of Zapopan in the late colonial period was expressed in terms that were consistent with the most traditional aspects of the Immaculist cult: following sixteenth-century Franciscan evangelization practices, the local population kept addressing and representing the image of the Virgin of Zapopan as tota pulchra (“completely beautiful,” the words of an Immaculate Conception hymn), which in turn linked local religious practice to larger doctrinal

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developments. In order to understand what was at stake in this process of change and permanence, a brief summary of the evolution of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is necessary. The notion of the Immaculate Conception of Mary refers to the idea that she was preserved from original sin at the moment of her conception. This idea apparently was the product of a long evolution in medieval Europe, especially in England, where traces of it can be found in poetry and prayers dating back to the second half of the eight century. In addition, medieval English liturgical books include references to the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary on December 8.22 This doctrine faced strong opposition within the Catholic Church because it challenged the dogma that only Jesus Christ had been born free from original sin. By the end of the thirteenth century, at the height of these debates, Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus proposed an explanation that would be the cornerstone of the Immaculist doctrine. In his commentary Opus Oxoniense, Scotus refuted every argument against this proposition and stated that Mary had been preserved from original sin because the grace of God could do so, because it was fit to do so, and therefore it had been done: Potuit, decuit, fecit.23 During the fifteenth century the cult of the Immaculate Conception found support in a sermon by the French scholar Jean Gerson (1401), “in which he gave a powerful, devotional exposition of the doctrine.”24 Several decades after that, the Council of Basle (1431–1438) endorsed the celebration of the feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, declaring that the doctrine was “pious, consonant with Catholic worship, Catholic faith, right reason, and Holy Scripture,” thus considering it illicit to preach or teach the contrary.25 On February 28, 1476, Pope Sixtus IV, a Franciscan, authorized the celebration of this feast in every diocese that wished to do so. On this basis, and especially influenced by Scotus’s thought, Franciscan missionaries spread this cult in New Spain, carrying small images like the ones Fray Antonio de Segovia took with him to Nueva Galicia. Thus, when the image of the Immaculate Conception was presented to the Indians of Zapopan, the Franciscans not only introduced the local residents to the cult of the Virgin Mary, they also linked wide areas of western New Spain to specific ways of addressing the roles of Mary in Christianity—and to specific ways of expressing these roles in art, ritual, and prayer. In practice, what the friars established in Zapopan was an Immaculist tradition that had been at

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the core of Franciscan thought and evangelizing efforts since the beginning of their order. By the time Segovia and his companions established their friaries and doctrines in this region, European painters and sculptors struggled to establish an image representing the abstract idea of the Marian conception.26 Early fifteenth-century standard solutions inspired in the Madonna tradition, generally portraying the Virgin with her child, coincided in depicting a young woman in the presence of divine illumination. Later developments during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries established a set of attributes and visual elements that seemed to synthesize the depictions rendered by the most authoritative proponents of Mary’s pure conception. Franciscan missionaries would use those elements of Marian iconography as visual aids in their preaching; but more important, those elements offered local Indians a plethora of possibilities for establishing a bridge between the community and the divine, as we’ll see in the case of Zapopan. Perhaps the most conspicuous element in the evolution of the Immaculate Conception’s iconography up to the mid-seventeenth century was Francisco Pacheco’s description provided in his Arte de la Pintura; in that manual, the artist (1564–1644) standardized this image’s visual representation: a young girl (twelve or thirteen years old), wearing a white tunic and a blue mantle, surrounded by the sun, with the moon under her feet, and finally, “the Dragon, [representing the] common enemy, whom the Virgin smashed by triumphing over original sin.” 27 The woman clothed with the sun emerges from these descriptions associating Mary with the wife in the biblical Song of Songs 4:7. The image Segovia left in Zapopan around 1540 was actually crafted in this tradition, since it represents a young lady with the moon at her feet.28 Coming back to the discussion of the Marian image in Zapopan, it might be worth pondering how this visual and ritual tradition was affected in 1654– 1655, when the bishop of Guadalajara granted a new title to the Virgin of Zapopan. Did local religious practice conform to the bishop’s idea of moving the Immaculist cult to his cathedral? Did the local devotees in Zapopan modify their ways of approaching the image? By the time Bishop Ruiz Colmenero approved the shift in the identification of the Marian image from Zapopan and granted official recognition to the stories of miraculous intervention through this image, the cult of the

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Our Lady of Zapopan without her ornaments and emblems.

Immaculate Conception seemed to be circumscribed to local parishioners, mostly Indians. No indications of special forms of veneration are recorded before Diego de Herrera’s account, which might suggest that up to that time Zapopan’s Indians had maintained the cult within the realm of local individual and communal practices.29 In contrast, after Ruiz Colmenero’s action toward the cult of Our Lady of Zapopan, news of periodical visitations to Guadalajara and annual pilgrimages to the small shrine start to emerge. But the bishop’s Marian promotion—or the invention, capture, and codification of a new pious tradition—is not all there is to the seventeenthcentury surge of religious fervor.30 What struck me as I learned about the development of Zapopan as a regional shrine is the fact that in spite of the introduction of the theme of the Expectation of the Virgin, the local devotees decided to participate in this commemoration along the lines of what they had been practicing before Ruiz Colmenero’s decree. Without proposing that the local religious practice required the devotees’ learned discernment of the theological implications of the Immaculate

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Our Lady of Zapopan’s processional tabernacle, eighteenth century (front). Courtesy of Archivo Histórico Franciscano de Zapopan.

Conception, I would like to suggest that the attributes associated with the Virgin as tota pulchra—sun, moon, clouds, mirror, stairs to heaven, connection with the woman in Song of Songs, and triumph over the common enemy—offered the local devotees ample opportunities to make sense of their world in a society structured according to Christian doctrine and controlled by external political powers. Local usage of those attributes several decades after the official association of Our Lady of Zapopan with the cult of the Expectation of Mary, as can be seen in her eighteenth-century portable tabernacle, might be indicative of the links between past and present: an Indian parish and the neighboring diocesan see. The wooden tabernacle, belonging to the collections of the museum of the Zapopan basilica, displays angelical and floral motifs among which the sun is also present.31 Almost imperceptible at a distance are clusters of text emanating

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Our Lady of Zapopan’s processional tabernacle, eighteenth century (exterior, right panel). Courtesy of Archivo Histórico Franciscano de Zapopan.

from the angels’ mouths, forming the hymn “Tota Pulchra Es Amica Mea” (“You Are Completely Beautiful, My Love”). The tabernacle’s interior holds a base for securing the image it would protect while in procession, and it also shows remains of candle wax. The internal decoration also displays a painted roof adorned with the moon and stars. This composed image suggests that as the devotion to Our Lady of the Expectation grew in the Guadalajara region after the second half of the seventeenth century, and as public display of her image was required away from her shrine, she traveled surrounded by the halo of the Immaculate Conception. Far from ideas of syncretism or hybridization, this example shows how anonymous members of a local community participated in the transformation of a religious tradition even though they were supposed to play a secondary role. The bishop’s mandates altered the local traditions, but the local devotees retained much of their image’s former symbolism and contents. Furthermore, with the image’s increased mobility, these continuities were taken to new spaces and beholders. In this sense the devotees of the Immaculate Conception in Zapopan may have experienced the process Ilona Katzew described in her analysis of visual representations, or re-creations, of the Aztec past in eighteenth-century

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paintings. By preserving the attributes of the Immaculate Conception when referring to Our Lady of the Expectation, the devotees could “create a liminal space that allowed each socio-racial group to express its identity in a public forum. Individuals performed their place within a prescribed script [and] in so doing, they catered to the elite’s expectations and exigencies, and in the process ensured their very political survival. This of course, was also a matter of social and ethnic pride, as participation in the city’s major public ceremonies validated the existence of each group and its rights.” 32 The example of the cult of Our Lady of Zapopan shows this kind of creative tension, albeit in the realm of official religion and local religious practice. Like other contexts in which processes of change and continuity converge, this case invites us to ask questions about how people made sense of old and new experiences. Assessing the significance of change and permanence means much more than identifying what is emerging and what is supposed to be left behind.33

Epilogue In March 1793 José Menéndez Valdés wrote a report on Zapopan as part of his visitation to the Intendancy of Guadalajara (1791–1793). There his attention was drawn to “a capable church [in which is venerated] the image of the [Immaculate] Conception . . . and to her cult come countless people from this whole reign.” 34 Further references offer indications of the permanence of Immaculist elements in the local context, such as in the naming of one of the bells of the sanctuary built there in the nineteenth century or in the composing of new hymns dedicated to Our Lady of Zapopan that referred to her as a continuous companion: “She is the Immaculate, the Virgin, our solace / the Queen of Jalisco, the Mother of Our Lord. / Eternal Hosanna to the triumphal Lady! / For her [be reserved] the olive branch of the Pacifier.” 35 Even today, when the feast of the Expectation of Mary (December 18) constitutes one of the major religious celebrations in Zapopan and her official title is included in hymns and prayer, occasional lapses bring up memories of this concurrence of paths. Browsing the website of a major publisher specializing in Mexican tourist destinations reminds us of this complexity, for it notes that “the image of the Virgin of the Expectation of Zapopan can be visited at the basilica of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception of Zapopan [sic].” 36

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This set of examples shows both innovations and continuities in local traditions. However, it does not suggest that in the case of the Marian cult in Zapopan one form of approaching the divine has been subtly preserved under new vestments. As a matter of fact, it is only fair to state that modern devotion to Our Lady of the Expectation in Zapopan—or Our Lady of the O, as it is also called, after the long “oh” that since medieval times was chanted at the beginning of solemn hymns in her honor—incorporates the emblems, attributes, titles, histories, and cult forms that have surrounded this image since the mid-sixteenth century. I would like to think that this case exemplifies what William Taylor meant when he cautioned us about the disposition to identify rupture, change, or rapid fusions when assessing the impact of cultural innovations in human societies. In those contexts, he said, “Change is ongoing and . . . great changes may come late.” 37 For societies in general, as well as individuals in particular, respond to alterations to their realities by deploying varied strategies over time. It is that continual reworking of one’s responses to changing realities that explains the paradox of finding “great persistences within great changes,” as Taylor put it.38 To return to the initial questions in this chapter: Historical explanation should not focus on the evidence of change or continuity per se, attempting to detect where transformation or permanence occur. I would like to suggest that instead of merely asking what is old and new in any given context, our goal should be to offer partial reconstructions of what the process of making sense of old and new realities might have been for individuals and societies— how they coped with attempts to challenge their social order and what elements they used when finding their ways through this process. Change and continuity are, of course, variables in this equation, but they are not the whole equation. We do need to keep asking questions about these processes, but we might reach a better understanding of these issues by recalling that the paradoxical nature of change and continuity lies at the bottom of individuals’ need to reconcile both in daily experience.

Notes 1. Agnes Heller, A Theory of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). 2. Advocates of historicism writing in the Marxist tradition agree that

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6. 7. 8. 9.

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“historicism is in fact the rejection of all permanent elements in history. History is life and death, it is change. The social is ephemeral.” Following Antonio Gramsci’s own position on this debate, they accept that movement “is the organic mode in which historical reality manifests itself.” Thus, the study of social phenomena “must always take into account their fleeting nature; or that the study of society is a study of a temporal process.” Esteve Morera, Gramsci’s Historicism: A Realist Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 2011), 54–57. In response to views like this, other scholars have wondered about society’s structural foundations. “In their search for universal and invariant structures, structuralists across the disciplines gave priority to synchrony over diachrony, form over content, the signifier over the signified, space over time, the text over the author, and the unconscious over the conscious. . . . Such goals were advocated in the quest for a united science. [In this context, according to François Dosse,] war was declared against historicism, the historical context, the search for origins, diachrony, teleology and the argument was made in favor of permanent invariables.” Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 43. Robert Nisbet, ed., “Introduction: The Problem of Social Change,” in Social Change (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 1–45. Phillippe Walter, Christianity: The Origins of a Pagan Religion (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006). Generous as he always has been, in his seminars at the University of California– Berkeley William Taylor did not provide an answer to the questions discussed in this chapter. Instead he offered different paths that lead to the conformation of several possible answers. I can only imagine his suggestion as an open invitation to be mindful of individuals, time, and place as historical realities and to avoid subordinating such views to preconceived theoretical formulations. William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 61. William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 30, 60. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, 50. José Ignacio Dávila Garibi, Apuntes para la historia de la Iglesia en Guadalajara (Guadalajara, Mexico: Editorial Cultura, 1961), 2:468; Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de Guadalajara (AHAG), Serie Parroquias, Parroquia de Zapopan, box 1, 1654–1799. Luis del Refugio Palacio y Basave, Historia breve y compendiosa del Colegio Apostólico de Propaganda Fide de N. Sra. de Zapopan (Guadalajara, Mexico: Tip. de C. M. Sainz, 1924), 2–5; Kieran McCarty, “Los franciscanos en la frontera chichimeca,” Historia Mexicana 43 (January–March 1962): 321–60. Manuel Portillo, Apuntes histórico-geográficos del Departamento de Zapopan (1889; repr., Zapopan, Mexico: El Colegio de Jalisco, 2000), 29.

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12. Gloria Cristina Florez, “Tota pulchra es Maria: Defensa del misterio de la Inmaculada Concepción en la prédica del virreinato peruano (1654–1736),” in Advocaciones Marianas de Gloria (Madrid: San Lorenzo del Escorial, 2012), 1126. 13. Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain: 1523–1572 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 158. 14. During the Tenth Council of Toledo (656) the Spanish Catholic bishops changed the feast day of the Annunciation of the Virgin from March 25 to December 18 in the season of Advent. It is not known when the name Exspectatio Partus (Expectation of Birth) was first used to refer to this feast, which spread from Spain to other countries; in 1695 it was granted to Venice and Toulouse, in 1702 to the Cistercian Order of monks, in 1713 to Tuscany, and in 1725 to the Papal States. “Feast of the Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view. php?id=4498. 15. Diego de Herrera’s manuscript account is the first documentary evidence of the alleged transformation of this cult. Closer examination of this record suggests that Herrera’s opinion was not congruent with local practice, which can be seen in the paintings discussed in the following sections of this chapter. In his capacity as the parish priest, Herrera attempted to inaugurate a new tradition by making a theological argument in favor of the appropriateness of this shift. What this invention lacked in historical accuracy was actually made up for in symbolism, for it documented the story of the image’s miracles, its classification, and the diocese of Guadalajara’s official interpretation of the image’s history and festival. Diego de Herrera, “Expedientes importantisimos tocantes a la Milagrosísima Imagen de María Santísima de Zapopan,” AHAG, Gobierno, Fondo Especial; José Ignacio Dávila Garibi, Un olvido imperdonable: D. Juan Ruiz Colmenero, meritísimo obispo neogallego del siglo XVII (Mexico City: Editorial Cultura, 1949). 16. Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 154–87; Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, 48–49. 17. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, 49. 18. Armando González Escoto, Historia breve de la Iglesia de Guadalajara (Guadalajara, Mexico: Universidad del Valle de Atemajac, 1998), 116. 19. Alberto Santoscoy, “El origen de la fiesta de la Inmaculada Concepción en Guadalajara,” in Obras completas (Guadalajara, Mexico: Gobierno de Jalisco, 1986), 2:578. 20. Francisco de Florencia, Origen de dos célebres santuarios de la Nueva Galicia (1757; repr., Zapopan, Mexico: El Colegio de Jalisco, 1998), 5, 14–26. 21. Florencia’s authority as a hagiographer is beyond the scope of this analysis, but it must be noted that in his description of the image from Zapopan, he merely

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23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

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reproduced Herrera’s opinions—in other words, Ruiz Colmenero’s program— on the image’s attributes. Timothy Finigan, “Belief in and Devotion to the Immaculate Conception in Medieval England,” in Mary at the Foot of the Cross (New Bedford, MA: Franciscans of the Immaculate, 2009), 5:344–59. In 1121 St. Anselm, the bishop of Canterbury, wrote De Conceptione Sanctae Mariae, the first apologetic work dedicated to this doctrine. Florez, “Tota pulchra,” 1125. John Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, sent. 4, bk. 3, dist. 3, quest. 1. Timothy Finigan, “Immaculate Conception after Scotus: Scotistic Mariology from Scotus to the Dogma of 1854; The Formation of a Mariological Tradition Based on the Immaculate Conception,” in Bl. John Duns Scotus and His Mariology: Commemoration of the Seventh Centenary of His Death (New Bedford, MA: Franciscans of the Immaculate, 2009), 301. Quoted in ibid., 304. “Few visual representations of the Immaculate Conception are known before 1500, although they became a staple of Catholic Reformation art, featuring prominently in Spanish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in the art of their New World colonies.” Melissa R. Katz and Robert A. Orsi, Divine Mirrors: The Virgin Mary in the Visual Arts (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 98. Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura (Seville, Spain: Simón Faxardo, 1649), 482–83; Katz and Orsi, Divine Mirrors, 98. In this case the image departs from Pacheco’s model and follows the practice of illuminating the moon from the bottom, which produces a crescent pointing up. Luis del Refugio Palacio y Basave, Recopilación de noticias y datos que se relacionan con la milagrosa imagen de Nuestra Señora de Zapopan y con su colegio y santuario (Guadalajara, Mexico: Talleres de la Universidad de Guadalajara, 1994), 10–11. Bishop Alonso de la Mota y Escobar’s visit to the diocese of Guadalajara (1608) and Domingo Lázaro de Arregui’s 1621 report on the population of Nueva Galicia remain silent on this issue. Lázaro de Arregui mentions, in passing, that in the Indian towns surrounding Guadalajara “there is nothing noteworthy.” Domingo Lázaro de Arregui, Descripción de la Nueva Galicia (Guadalajara, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Jalisco, 1980), 115. The devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and the impulse it had “in a cluster of studied little books by priest-devotees printed between 1648 and 1688” is described in Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images, 98–99. Although the authorship and exact dates of the designs have yet to be established, associations with indigenous eighteenth-century craftsmanship displayed in nearby Santa Cruz de las Flores and Tlajomulco have been suggested. Ilona Katzew, ed., “‘Remedo de la ya muerta América’: The Construction of Festive Rites in Colonial Mexico,” in Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011), 168.

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33. If the past were entirely disassociated from new experiences, “there wouldn’t be any history, so there must be continuity and identity as well, but I think the issue is to ensure the play between the two.” Patrick Wright, “Just Start Digging: Memory and the Framing of Heritage,” Memory Studies 3, no. 3 (July 2010): 202–3. 34. José Menéndez Valdés, Descripción y censo general de la Intendencia de Guadalajara, 1789–1793 (Guadalajara, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Jalisco, 1980), 119. 35. “Ella es la Inmaculada, la Virgen, el consuelo, / la reina de Jalisco, la Madre del Señor. / Hosanas sempiternos a la triunfal señora! / Para ella las olivas de Pacificadora.” Armando González Escoto, El santuario de Zapopan: Nuestra Virgen, Nuestra Historia (Guadalajara, Mexico: Universidad del Valle de Atemajac, 2007), 230; the reference to the bell is on page 63. 36. “Nuestra Señora de Zapopan, Jalisco,” México Desconocido, http://www. mexicodesconocido.com.mx/nuestra-senora-de-zapopan-jalisco.html. 37. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, 56. 38. Ibid., 62.

Chapter 10

Foregrounding Marginal Voices



Writing Women’s Stories Using Solicitation Trials Jessica Delgado

Telling stories is central to the historian’s craft, but that craft demands a faithfulness to the imperfect sources that serve as our only tether to a mostly unreachable past. These sources are not raw material, however—not bundles of facts and information from which we build our tales; rather, they have authors and plots of their own. When the people we hope to cast as protagonists make only cameo appearances in the narratives of our sources, yet those sources are the only window we have into their lives, choices, and experiences, telling their stories requires careful recasting. William B. Taylor credits Inga Clendinnen with a concept and skill that he teaches his students and that he himself employs in his scholarship. “Exact imagining” is a way of thinking about and doing history that acknowledges the postulation and speculation required to grapple with enigmatic and fragmented pieces of evidence. Although we seek as much clarity and accuracy as possible, imagining will always be part of the historian’s work. But exact refers to the faithfulness and commitment to the sources the imagination engages. The image I use to understand (and relay to students) the idea of exact imagining is a kite on a string. For a kite to work, it should be free to fly, dip, and swirl in the many directions the wind’s currents allow for, but it can never come free from its string. In this metaphor the kite represents the work of imagining the parameters of our story, and the string represents our sources and an exact commitment to them. The concept of exact imagining is especially relevant for writing about

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people whose lives left only faint traces in the extant historical record. Historians of Latin America who are interested in colonial “Indians,” slaves, women, and people of humble social status in general must wrestle with sources authored primarily by elite, literate men to hear the occasional, quiet echoes of other voices, preserved but not privileged.1 This chapter explores this problem in relation to laywomen’s testimonies from Inquisition solicitation trials. It intersperses methodological reflections about the process of writing women’s stories with brief vignettes. Moving between the two, I hope to illuminate the process of moving from the source narratives, in which these women play marginal roles, to my own narrative, in which I seek to place them as central characters.

Reframing the Narrative Arc: An Interrupted Sacrament I first encountered solicitation cases in my quest to learn about “ordinary” women’s interactions with the Church in colonial Mexico. As a graduate student, unfamiliar with the mechanisms by which the majority of these testimonies were gathered, I was struck by what appeared to be hundreds of women coming forward to denounce priests who abused their sacramental power by making sexual advances toward their penitents. I was already envisioning these women as the protagonists of their own stories: having been exploited, they boldly turned to the available authorities for justice. This turned out to be a misreading, however, since it did not take into account the events that led to these women’s “voluntary” testimonies. A closer look revealed that in almost every instance in which a woman was said to have appeared “sin ser llamada” (i.e., without being called by the Inquisition), she had actually submitted her testimony at the direction of a priest who withheld absolution until she did so. The Inquisition defined solicitation as a priest using the sacrament of Penance (confession) for sexual purposes. To police the clergy, the inquisitors instructed the confessors to question their penitents about the latter’s previous confessors and, if they uncovered instances of sacramental abuse, to require the penitents to denounce the guilty priests before receiving absolution. Sometimes the confessor allowed the penitent to dictate a denunciation and then presented it to the inquisitors for her. Given the importance of absolution and the anxiety many penitents must have felt about leaving the confessional

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without it, these testimonies can hardly be said to have been truly voluntary. This awareness changed the way I read these testimonies and shaped the way I wrote about them. Although this sacramental interruption was usually mentioned only in passing as an explanation for presenting the denunciation, it held much more significance for the women who were testifying. Therefore, in telling their stories I have often tried to foreground this moment as the anchor of the narrative.

María Josefa Fernandez Sometime in February or March 1793, in the friary of Santa Isabel in Mexico City, a twenty-four-year-old servant named María Josefa Fernandez told a story to her confessor, Father José Miguel de Aguilar. The events she spoke of had taken place in July of the previous year, when Aguilar was out of town. During his month’s absence, Fernandez had turned to the friary chaplain, Father Joaquin García for her weekly confession. Fernandez reported that the chaplain solicited her the first time she went to him and continued to make sexual advances in the next few weeks. She described both her spiritual anxiety about sacramental impropriety and her social fear about scandal in the friary, whereas García was brazenly unconcerned with either. Although Aguilar returned in early August, Fernandez still had to deal with García’s continued presence as the friary chaplain. Perhaps that is why she waited so long to tell her confessor about these interactions. Perhaps she was afraid she would lose her position as the personal servant of Madre Sor Gertrudis de Corazon, a more privileged and less onerous position than that of a common friary or domestic servant. Whatever caused her reticence, Fernandez eventually did tell Aguilar one day in confession. Maybe he asked pointed questions in response to an Inquisition edict or became suspicious of García upon noticing that something was troubling Fernandez. Or maybe Fernandez herself chose to relieve her conscience after keeping silent for eight or nine months. However it came to pass, Aguilar interrupted the confession to tell Fernandez that he could not absolve her until she denounced García to the Inquisition. Maybe he communicated gently or scolded her for waiting so

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long. We have no way of knowing how Aguilar received the news. But whether he blamed her or felt protective of her, he offered her a relatively gentle way to proceed. Asking her to dictate what happened, Aguilar wrote it down and delivered it to the Inquisition in her name. This path allowed him to minimize her anxiety and absolve her before she left the confessional—something she must have been grateful for. Fernandez probably hoped she could put her experience with García to rest after this, but instead, as a result of this denunciation, the Inquisition called her to testify in what became an extensive trial against the chaplain. After Fernandez appeared on April 11, the inquisitors launched their usual “secret” investigation into Fernandez’s own reputation to assess her credibility as a witness. Questioning other friary residents about her sacramental habits and personal character must have stirred up rumors and gossip, giving rise to the kind of scandal and conflict Fernandez had feared all along.2 The testimonies from which I created the above vignette are rich and detailed, and I have used them elsewhere to tell three stories: the first about socially humble laywomen’s sacramental vulnerability, the second about urban women’s strategic resistance to solicitation, and the third about the experiences of servants in friaries.3 The first two engaged more fully with the details of Fernandez’s testimony and followed its chronology. There I highlighted her limited options as she faced García’s increasingly coercive ploys, as well as the strategies she used to avoid sexual contact while still receiving the sacraments. For the third story, as in the above vignette, I chose a starting point outside the chronology of her testimony. In that narrative I emphasized her other relationships and what may have happened before and after García solicited her. Although there are many ways to imagine Fernandez’s experiences, Garcia’s interruption of the sacrament appears troublesome for Fernandez—perhaps even traumatic—and her actions suggest that even though she very much hoped to avoid conflict with this confessor, it was also important to her to complete the sacraments and ensure that she did so properly. In all these stories, including the above vignette, neither my focus nor my narrative priorities reflect that of the documents as a whole; the actual trial record begins with the first denunciation of García, moves through the gathering of evidence and the calling and re-calling of witnesses, and ends with his formal accusation, testimony, and judgment. The various women whose

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lives and faith practices were disrupted appear only briefly and then fade from view. However, my own narrative reordering could not be done effectively without first understanding the case as a whole. In other words, I could not leap directly to the story I wanted to tell. I had to get to know the whole document as a text—as it was written—even though the majority of it did not reflect on the person I sought to foreground. Although the larger narrative of the investigation and trial might not be essential for the reader of the particular story I wanted to tell, it was essential for me as a historian and an author as I prepared to write. Only by understanding what the creators of this document were up to—what they were trying to convey; what narrative (textual, generic, and procedural) conventions they were working with; and what processes, mechanics, and intellectual and theological purposes lay behind all these things—could I recognize the clues that led me to the aspects of Fernandez’s experience that were probably most significant to her.

Reframing the Narrative Arc: Being a Witness and Solicited In the narrative of these trial records, the drama centers on the accused priests and the interrogating inquisitors; the women testifying appear not as victims or opponents but as passive witnesses to a crime against the sacraments. They play bit parts: their experiences were important only in as much as they clarified whether the accused was guilty of true solicitation, and their identities and circumstances were relevant only in regard to their reliability as witnesses. Telling their stories therefore requires reframing and reorienting the narrative around the moments that might have been most significant to them. In the above discussion I focused on the centrality and consequences of the sacramental interruption that led these women to become witnesses. But there were other important moments as well. As historians we have the power to choose what to foreground and what to leave out or deemphasize. Although we may try to deduce what was most important to our subjects, this effort is not the only thing that guides our choices. We are also creating our own narratives. We may try to center our subjects’ experiences, but we are still fitting those experiences into our own larger story, and some distortion is bound to be part of that task. In other words, we are trading one narrative logic for another, and even though we are choosing a framework that we hope illuminates our subject’s lives, the

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process of pressing those lives, with all their complexities, into any narrative logic always implies a certain amount of reduction—even violence. We impose a story line whenever we tell a story; we take messy and paradoxical realities and build coherent arguments. Synoptic approaches to this process aim to minimize the artificial flattening of complex realities by allowing some of this messiness to remain: paradoxes and multiple possibilities can be honored and highlighted rather than smoothed over; questions opened and left unanswered can be part of our narratives. Yet even within these commitments, in order to write something readable we make authorial choices, and these choices imply priorities and approximations. In my own choices I have tried to imagine what mattered most to these women, based on my reading of the sources and what I know about the larger historical context in which they were produced. After reading many of these kinds of cases, I found that three moments rose to the surface: the sacramental interruption, the experience of testifying, and the events that made up the alleged solicitation. Because of length constraints, this chapter will focus only on the first two. I have written elsewhere about women’s experiences with solicitation itself and what they can tell us about the meaning of confession and communion in women’s lives.4 To determine what was most important I had to imagine certain aspects of life for the kind of women that appeared in these cases. For instance, what were the sacramental options of a pious urban Spanish woman, a mestiza domestic worker, or a rural “Indian”? What importance did public reputation hold for a poor española—a woman of Spanish descent born in New Spain—working in a friary or a market woman of mixed African descent? Although inquisitorial attitudes and behavior related to the social hierarchies that shaped women’s lives, the records themselves are only obliquely illuminating on these questions. Thus, interpreting them for my particular writing purposes required other contextual work.5 Having decided that the three moments noted above were the issues to highlight, I then crafted the women’s stories around one or more of them. Depending on what I was writing, I asked questions like these of each case: Is this a good example of the experience of testifying? Or is it better for showing how women responded to priests’ sexual demands? Does it illuminate how these women may have understood their sacramental experiences— differently, perhaps, from how the inquisitors sought to depict them? Or does

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it shed light on the way that Inquisition investigations affected those experiences? My choice of questions shaped the narrative I eventually wrote, and my contextualized understanding of the sources shaped the questions I asked. As historians, we are not simply reconstructing the past as it was; we are interpreting and imagining it in light of our own creative processes— even though we try to do so in a way that honors our subjects’ historically contextualized lives. To have something substantial to say about any particular woman’s experience in an actual trial, I had to learn to interpret the authorial conventions of the recording scribes and the interrogators. Over time, marginal notes written after a testimony occurred, correspondence between the inquisitors, and notary comments made during the testimonies became particularly important elements of these documents for me. The following stories partly illustrate why.

María Antonia Gutiérrez and Juana Navaro Doña María Antonia Gutiérrez was a respected and wealthy Spanish widow from Toluca, and the inquisitors treated her accordingly when she testified about her relationship with the Jesuit priest Tomás de Sandoval. By her own account, she had regularly feigned illness so that Sandoval would come to her house, ostensibly to hear her confession at her bedside. She testified that confession did not actually happen at these rendezvous and that the sacrament was just a pretext for their sexual encounters. This was clearly dishonorable behavior, yet Gutiérrez’s public piety and probably her wealth and social status led the inquisitors to decide that she was a credible witness. The marginal notes describe her as a woman devoted to the sacraments and known to be free of scandal. The inquisitors believed her story, and it became important evidence in the case against Sandoval. Juana Navaro, a twenty-six-year-old woman whom the inquisitors described as a mulata soltera (an unmarried woman, not a virgin, of mixed African descent) was not afforded the same respect. According to her testimony, she had gone to Sandoval for confession for eight years when he first asked her to meet him in a dark corner of the church, where he fondled her furtively for thirty minutes before releasing her. These demands continued

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for four years until Navaro sought another confessor. Perhaps she experienced these encounters as sexual violence, or perhaps she thought of Sandoval as a lover. Maybe she did not know how to understand these events, and the power relationship of confessor and penitent limited her ability to respond. The inquisitors did not ask about her feelings or reactions, however. In fact, her reputation and probably her racial and sexual status—“mulata soltera”—led the inquisitors to disbelieve her from the start. The marginal notes described her as a woman of mala fama, or bad repute (seemingly based on the fact that she had at least one publicly known sexual relationship). In spite of the fact that numerous women reported coercive sexual encounters with Sandoval and that he was eventually found guilty of repeated instances of solicitation, the inquisitors decided that Navaro was not a credible witness and that she had spoken out of “malice.” They dismissed her testimony without further consideration.6 These two stories come from the long trial of Tomás de Sandoval. They afford a comparative look at one aspect of women’s experience of testifying— namely, how the inquisitors heard them. Familiarity with trial records in general allowed me to understand the meaning of the scribbled notes in the margins alongside the witness testimonies. Armed with the knowledge of “secret” witness investigations, I could then read these comments, the testimonies, and the inquisitors’ decisions together and learn something about the criteria for witness credibility. Neither Gutiérrez’s nor Navaro’s testimony indicates anything about the woman’s feelings, interpretations, or reactions related to the events described. This absence itself directed my attention back to the margin notes and the responses of the listening inquisitors and scribes. I do not mean direct responses, for the inquisitors’ questioning was often formulaic. Rather, I am referring to other layers of commentary—in margin notes, on the pages where testimonies were concluded, or in separate documents—in which the inquisitors relayed what they thought should be done with the recorded testimony. Navaro’s testimony was filed under “false,” whereas Gutierrez’s was taken seriously as part of the mounting evidence. Why was this the case? How the witnesses responded to the advances of the accused was apparently unimportant, so what was it that mattered most? Here is where exact imagining comes into play. The hierarchical worldview

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of the peninsular inquisitors was sometimes visible in statements like “as is common for women of her caste,” but in these two cases the connections among wealth, race, and sexual and spiritual status were not spelled out quite so clearly. Nonetheless, the inquisitors’ assertion that Navaro gave her testimony out of malice can be read through the proximity of the labels mulata and soltera to words like disorderly and mala fama. And in Gutierrez’s case, the presence of the words pious and buen vivir (morally good living) despite the fact that she admitted to an ongoing adulterous and blasphemous sexual relationship with a priest should tell us something about what mattered to the inquisitors and how they made their decisions. In both cases the women’s behavior with the accused was irrelevant for how the inquisitors heard their stories; what mattered was these women’s publicly recognized social standing and reputation—and this was shaped, most certainly, by the gendered and racialized social hierarchies of colonial Mexico. Reparation, justice, and healing for the women testifying was not the inquisitors’ concern, but as witnesses these women had the opportunity to tell their stories. Although they might not have chosen to testify, they could sometimes use the forum to condemn the behavior of the accused. I have not found many cases in which it was clear that women did this, but the following story points to the possibility.

María Marta Gertrudis By the time she testified, María Marta Gertrudis had lost everything. As a result of repeated sexual assaults by Father Joaquín García, the chaplain of the friary of Santo Isabel who was temporarily stationed in Tulango, she was left impoverished, unemployed, socially ostracized, and physically weakened. The Inquisition called Gertrudis to testify when her name came up in the trial of García. The inquisitors ultimately deemed her testimony irrelevant because the accused had never actually heard her confession, but Gertrudis nonetheless used her audience to decry García’s abusive behavior outside the confessional. By the time Gertrudis met García, he had established close ties with many of the wealthy and powerful families of Tulancingo, staying with “the best señoras in town” and serving as their personal confessor.7 Although she was

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from humble origins—a domestic servant and the illegitimate daughter of a household cook—Gertrudis had a reputation among her social peers as a respectable young woman. She and her mother lived and worked in the home of two wealthy widows who frequently received García as an honored guest. It was on one of these occasions that he raped Gertrudis at knifepoint. After this she refused to go to him for confession, in spite of her employers’ urging. Instead she went to another local priest, who, perhaps preferring to avoid conflict with a colleague, told her he would hear her confession only after García left town. So for the duration of García’s stay, not only did Gertrudis suffer García’s continued sexual assaults, she also had to remain in a spiritually precarious state without confession. To prevent the suspicion of her employers, she accepted a falsified certificate from García of having completed confession and communion, but she told the comisario (local Inquisition representative) that she had actually refused the sacraments at the hands of the man who had violated her. Gertrudis was publicly known as a doncella, or virgin, and was engaged to a man of equal social status. But when García’s assaults resulted in her pregnancy, her fiancé publicly ended their relationship and her employers banished both her and her mother from their home. Having lost both her job and her future husband, she conceded to the coercive sexual relationship with García until after her child was born. Perhaps she expected García to offer some support, or perhaps she simply did not have the strength to resist. In any case, she had very few options available to her as an unwed, unemployed pregnant woman. Her pregnancy was physically difficult, and she suffered serious complications with the birth. She told the comisario that even though García witnessed her grave postpartum illness, which left her near death, he returned to Mexico City soon after the baby was born, leaving her two pesos and ceasing all contact. Gertrudis’s explanation of why she did not want to go to García for confession reflects a sense of pride that those around her might not have expected from her. She told the commissar that she refused because to accept García as her confessor would have been like pardoning him. Ironically, it was the fact that she had not gone to confession that made her testimony irrelevant in the eyes of the inquisitors; García was found not guilty of solicitation with Gertrudis, no matter how much damage he had caused. But for Gertrudis the sacrament held a different meaning. She said that if people had seen her

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confessing to him, it would be like letting him off the hook for her moral, economic, and social ruin. Lying to her employers was one thing—something necessary for survival. But she did not want to publicly confirm García’s innocence when he had harmed her in such a fundamental way. Gertrudis’s story practically leapt off the page at me. Her words were powerful and unusual. However, they appeared in a relatively small fragment of the document. Because the inquisitors ruled her testimony to be irrelevant, she was not called back repeatedly for questioning like other witnesses. Two skills that I have developed in working with these cases are particularly important for writing a story like that of Gertrudis. The first was knowledge of the usual trial practices and the shape of witness testimonies. Only by reading a large number of these types of cases could I identify the way Gertrudis’s testimony was different, and only through familiarity with the usual format could I see that she spoke her condemnation at the first opportunity—when the examiners asked if she had anything to add. In other words, even though it might appear that she waited until the very end of her testimony to speak these words, knowledge of usual court procedures reveals that she spoke them as soon as she had the opportunity to do so. The second skill was the ability to see each testimony, however short or incomplete, as its own separate text—contained within the larger context of the trial, but worthy of a sustained close reading on its own. Fragments make up a great deal of the source base for women’s history in early Latin America, and learning to mine them for the ingredients of a whole story is crucial for this field. But this requires holding in tension an awareness of the larger context, knowledge of comparative textual examples, and a simultaneously narrow focus for the close reading of single fragmentary pieces. This can be difficult because it is easy to get caught up in the drama of the trial narrative and follow its logic—dismissing or missing parts that are minimized and that don’t seem to matter to its unfolding. When approaching a particular woman’s story or experience, I have often written a first draft that I then discarded—or dramatically cut and rewrote— realizing that I was staying too close to the narrative of the trial and its records and that this chronology and these plot movements were in fact obscuring the very people I wanted to make more visible. In the case of Gertrudis, for example, the inquisitors’ debate about whether García’s actions

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should count as solicitation, which centered on discussions about the role of confession, were at first very compelling to me. I spent a fair amount of time in early drafts parsing out the evidence for the different positions on this question. But as Gertrudis’s own brief but powerful concluding statement became increasingly important in my reading, I came to realize that from her perspective this debate was beside the point. After a while I developed a strategy for resisting the pull of the most visible dramas in these cases. After I had worked with enough solicitation cases to understand the common patterns, I started to experiment with how I encountered individual documents. We do not always think about the writing process as beginning with choices we make about the order and manner in which we process our materials, but in this case I discovered that this could make a difference. I began to approach cases by first gathering the testimonies within them and reading them together—out of context—and sometimes reading them alongside testimonies from other similar cases. Only after this did I turn to the still essential task of understanding the documents as a whole and imagining all the events they represented. I want to emphasize that this experiment would not have been effective if I had not first gotten to know a large number of cases by prioritizing an understanding of each document as a whole and the intentions and practices of its authors. But after about a year of working closely with these sources, I found that I could change the way I read them to yield very productive results. Pausing before focusing on the drama of the trial itself and focusing instead on women’s words, placed in juxtaposition to other women’s words, allowed me to see patterns and exceptions that I might otherwise have missed—at least it allowed me to identify them sooner. And this helped me to start imagining, early in the process, how I might write these women’s stories in ways that placed them at the center. How, then, do we go about foregrounding marginal voices? As we work with solicitation trial records, a crucial task is to reframe the narrative as best we can from the exactly imagined perspective of the testifying and solicited women themselves. For me this began with my reading practices. I had to get to know the documents intimately by reading a large number of them, identifying their dominant narratives, and contextually imagining what these narratives represented, privileged, and obscured. Then I began to experiment:

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I read pieces of the documents out of order and out of context in order to challenge the dominant narratives and see other stories. Finally, when I sat down to write I tried to imagine the new story from various alternative starting points, replotting the events and highlighting things that were peripheral to the purposes of the trial. For any of this to work, I had to learn as much as I could about the larger historical contexts—places, religious concepts, juridical procedures, and so on—and try my best to imagine the choices and possibilities of each woman’s life, given what little I knew about her social position and circumstances. The exact imagining required for taking minor actors and making them protagonists begins with our questions and contextualized interpretations and ends with our ways of writing. It requires a synoptic vision that can hold multiple possible vantage points simultaneously, while seeking a context for each. But in the end it also entails making creative literary choices. It is important not only where we, as historians, focus our attention but also where we, as writers, invite our readers to do the same.

Notes 1. A good example of this kind of work in action is Inga Clendinnen, “Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing ‘Religion, in Sixteenth Century Mexico,” History and Anthropology 5 (1990): 105–41. I put Indian in quotes to indicate that this word is an English translation of the colonial term and legal category indio. Not only was it never a primary term of self-identification for the indigenous people and their descendants, whom the colonial authorities named as such, but indio has come to be understood as a pejorative term in modern Latin America. Its English translation, Indian, has an equally loaded genealogy. So although it is commonplace for historians of colonial Latin America to call indigenous people and their descendants Indians, I find this a questionable practice intellectually and politically and therefore use it only to indicate the colonial naming practices or the recognized category of scholarly interest. 2. Banc. Inq. MSS 96/95m, 1793, Fray Joaquín García, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Although these investigations were theoretically secret, in fact they resulted in rumor and the spread of information. 3. Jessica Delgado, “Sacred Practice, Intimate Power: Laywomen and the Church in Colonial Mexico,” PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009. 4. Ibid. 5. In this I owe a great debt to the collective work of other historians of women’s

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lives, in particular, that of Asuncion Lavrin, Pilar Gonzalbo, Solange Alberro, and Josephina Muriel. Besides this secondary work I have found other documentary sources to be crucial for this contextual work: episcopal court records, friary and lay cloister documents, and other kinds of Inquisition records shed important light on the constraints and possibilities under which women lived in colonial Mexico. 6. Banc. Inq. MSS 96/95m, 1750, Fray Tomás Sandoval. 7. Banc. Inq. MSS 96/95m, 1793, Fray Joaquín García.

Chapter 11

Writing Style and Audience Sylvia Sellers-García

 Why do so many scholars consider books for popular audiences a lesser form of writing? Scholars have argued that popular history books eliminate necessary nuance, oversimplify, and reinforce familiar grand narratives that then in turn reinforce erroneous and damaging stereotypes. Sometimes, they argue, popular history books are simply full of historical errors. Historians Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens pointed out in a 2012 Atlantic Monthly article that ideology has something to do with it: the immense popularity of histories by David Barton (on the Right) and Howard Zinn (on the Left) can be explained by the political zeal of their readers. But this popularity is also, they claim, a result of what they consider the insidious appeal of “a sort of Da Vinci Code history”: history presented as truth that has been concealed by centuries of cover-ups, then grandly revealed by the author as he (almost always he, in this conception) pulls back the curtain.1 This is the kind of approach that makes many academic historians roll their eyes. Nevertheless, the chances are that your first exposure to history, even the very reason you became interested in history, was something more “popular” than “academic.” It might have been a popular nonfiction book. It might have been a novel or an image. It might have even been something on television. (Students: nod. Teachers: wince.) Yet here you are now, expected to read and write academic history. How did it come to this? How did that deftly plotted historical mystery get you here, in the land of the dubiously relevant? Many

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nonacademic readers—even those with greater sophistication than those described by Beneke and Stephens—believe that scholarly books are deliberately obstructionist in style, consumed with minutiae, and self-consciously uninterested in arguing for their own relevance, even as they are passionately devoted to topics of appalling obscurity. Historians of colonial Latin America find themselves in the awkward position of delving entirely, in the eyes of some readers, into a field of appalling obscurity. Both of these perspectives, popular and academic, are to some extent justified. It is true that some popular histories gravitate toward grand narratives and familiar, often distorted topics: great presidents, great wars, great heroes (and maybe a couple of heroines). Their authors and readers would argue that these are the topics that matter. It is also true that some scholarly monographs, by attempting to speak intelligently into a finegrained conversation among specialists, burrow deeply into subjects that have been elaborated over years or decades and thereby require more preparatory background than any book introduction, however lucid, can offer. Their authors and readers would argue that a topic does not have to be well rehearsed for it to matter. Indeed, cannot the neglected topic matter more because it is neglected? (Full disclosure: I am a historian of colonial Central America, so I am clearly a member of the camp of authors writing on neglected topics.) You may or may not believe that it is worthwhile to engage both kinds of readers. You may or may not like both kinds of writing. As a student of history, you might wonder why popular and academic can’t just be friends and meet somewhere in the middle. As a writer of history, you may feel a passing (or not so passing) frustration that what is popular is popular and what is obscure is obscure. As a Latin Americanist, you might let out a long and disdainful breath, reflecting on the large portion of the United States that used to be Spanish and the inversely proportional segment of the current population that knows it. But what is undeniable is that scholars and authors of popular history books are writing for different audiences, and those audiences have different expectations. The argument of this chapter is that historical writing for different audiences should be intentional and considered rather than unconscious and unconsidered. By doing this we can assess in a more informed way whether a particular piece of writing should simplify or complicate, treat the familiar

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or the obscure, step back for a grand panoramic view or tunnel deeper for the tiny speck of investigative gold. This argument rests on two premises: first, it is worthwhile trying to reach different kinds of readers, and second, not all readers should be expected to like and appreciate what scholars create for one another. The sooner we begin to practice writing for different audiences, the more adept we will become. This means starting as undergraduates, if we can. If you are unenthused by the idea of reaching nonscholars or if you wonder why we should bother, you might as well ask why we teach colonial Latin American history in classrooms. Reaching nonscholars is already part of what we do. There are some who may like the idea of writing for scholarly audiences and letting other writers (journalists and popular historians) transform the rich feast of erudition into digestible snacks for the masses. It’s true that this can work. But just as often it doesn’t work, and scholars throw up their hands in frustration at how their careful work has been mashed to a pulp to make it supposedly palatable for a broader audience. Reaching a broader audience is worth the time, and not just because we have to prove to the world that the humanities are relevant. It is worthwhile because our area of study deserves readers. If you still have doubts, think about how many fields exist in which you are inexpert. Should you be barred as a reader in those fields until you acquire six to seven years of expertise? Certainly not. Consider the fact that you too have had the experience of reading something in an unknown and doubtlessly mystifying and perhaps dull field before finding, to your surprise, that it was comprehensible and interesting. You thought at the time that it was good writing. Actually, it was writing with a clear target, writing aimed precisely at you. Why shouldn’t a historian be able to write a compelling scholarly article about his or her research for the specialists and at the same time write a column that demonstrates to magazine readers how much this research matters? It is an advantage to be able to control these elements of writing intentionally rather than having them happen of their own accord. Probably not all topics can or should be offered to all audiences, but having the ability to choose—and being the one who does the adapting—is an advantage. I’m going to suggest three things that will help make this process intentional: imagining an audience precisely, developing varied and deliberately distinct styles, and being consistent in using those styles.

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Imagining an Audience Precisely The first step in imagining an audience precisely may surprise you: work not historically but fictively. Even a class research paper requires the imaginative invention of an audience: the only reader is the instructor, but the paper assumes an audience in the middle distance—one who knows more than the average person but not as much as the professor. Otherwise the paper would read like a letter to the instructor, full of self-doubting asides. (“You already know this, but the term Indian can be thought of as referring to the legal sphere.”) I remember finding this paralyzing the first time I wrote a paper in graduate school. The professor obviously knew more than I did about the books in question, not to mention the field, yet I was supposed to write with an air of authority about both, describing them in general terms as if they were sort of, but not entirely, new. The reader was my instructor, but the paper had to be written as if another audience was reading it. If you’ve ever written a paper for a class, you’ve already done this. But how much thought did you put into the fictional not-just-your-instructor audience? How much reading had your fictional audience done on the subject? And in what discipline(s) did they do their reading? Did they have more academic training than you, or less? Did they speak the necessary languages? What assumptions did they have about the subject? My audience for that first paper in graduate school wasn’t very well imagined. I was coming from a different discipline (comparative literature), and I didn’t think enough about how an audience for a history paper would be different. Since then I’ve become much more deliberate about imagining audiences, but it has continued to be a challenge. When one is writing about colonial Central America, the audience is something of a moving target: there are the few who work in the region and therefore know a great deal about it, and there are the many who don’t actively research the region but know something about it. (Admittedly, many is perhaps optimistic when speaking of my reading audience.) The something is very hard to guess at. And even though the complications here have to do with the region, you may well find yourself facing other, similar challenges. How do you grapple with them?

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Consider the Publishing Venue before, Not after, You Write Even within academic circles, audiences do not all look the same. Submitting the same article to Mesoamerica and the American Historical Review would be as foolhardy as turning in the same paper for an economics and a history class, even though there might be many topics adaptable to both. It stands to reason that one should write differently from the start. It might sometimes be a good idea to write about a topic and see what emerges, but the question of where it’s going should always be present. Whether the format is a research paper or a trade book, writing is intended to communicate. Beginning with a venue in mind will allow you to be as precise as possible in how you communicate. It’s also the easiest way to be consistent. Writing a draft of something and then going back to revise it for a different audience is possible, but it makes it much more likely that your voice will be inconsistent. The earlier your venue is chosen, the more deeply that choice will inform your style, references, and so on.

Research the Audience of the Publishing Venue It’s that old cliché: know your audience—except I’m arguing that really knowing your audience is impossible, so you should invent it based on good information. I am loath to recommend a single way of getting that information, since there are as many ways to get at it as there are venues. Work quantitatively and find out the circulation of various journals. Ask the library you use what it subscribes to and how it chooses books. I would begin by asking other students and scholars what they read, since I think we don’t do this enough, anyway.

Invent Your Audience Rather Than Guessing at It A friend of mine who lives in Oakland, California, works at a publishing company in San Francisco with an enviable proximity to Giants Stadium and a fantastic set of conference rooms with full-length glass windows. When I visited her once, we wandered through the airy upper rooms to admire the view. Along the inner walls, illuminated by the shocking sunlight, were

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posters that the press had been using to think about the target audiences for its soon-to-be-published books. I would have expected a whiteboard and some brainstorming in blue marker. Instead the posters looked like polished personal ads. The readers had names and photos; details about family members, pets, and daily habits; favorite locales; things they liked to eat and wear. And I might be remembering wrong, but I think there were even fanciful things like “dream vacation destination.” The point is, these were people— well, fictional people, characters. They were more wholly realized than I would have imagined. If you’re anything like me, you find this kind of marketing vaguely discomfiting and have no desire to emulate it when you’re immersed in the writing process. (And I admit, in part I was unnerved because it was creepy to see versions of myself in more than one profile poster.) You can get over it by resting assured that your scholarly writing will probably never be marketed by anyone this way, ever. Sorry. I might be wrong, in which case congratulations. But it’s very unlikely. Besides, what you’re doing by imagining a target audience isn’t marketing. The press in San Francisco was imagining its ideal readers and figuring out how to market books to them. You are imagining ideal readers and figuring out how to write books for them. These efforts are very different, but both of them do benefit from being specific and fully imagined. If it’s tough to imagine an audience precisely, it might help to choose a person—a real person, that is. I have two people in mind as I write this chapter. I’m imagining a certain colleague and a certain student, both of whom might have uses for this book. Keeping them in mind helps me exclude the material they don’t need, pitch the ideas in a way I think they will find appealing, and project the writing as a dialogue with them. This last item, as you would expect, influences the style of the prose.

Developing Varied and Deliberately Distinct Styles I think we don’t pay enough attention to style when we write research papers, let alone when we go on to write scholarly articles and monographs. But it affects every reading experience we have, so we probably shouldn’t neglect the consideration of it in our own writing.

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Choose Writing You Like and Discover Why You Like It You’ve doubtlessly had the experience of finding an author unlikable for a reason you can’t pinpoint (style) or the opposite experience of loving a book because something about it (style again) just works. These mysteries should be identified and scrutinized. Pick up the work of an author you don’t like and the book you love and figure out what is creating the effect in each. I don’t mean the qualities you dislike (vague, pompous, too dense) and do like (smart, clear, approachable). I mean what about the writing creates those qualities. Let me demonstrate with some passages from books I admire that are aimed at very different audiences. Here is Charles Mann discussing how planting a garden gave him the inspiration to write a book and a comforting sense of home: To biologists this must seem like poppycock. At various times my tomato patch has housed basil, eggplant, bell peppers, kale, chard, several types of lettuce and lettuce-like greens, and a few marigolds, said by my neighbors to repel bugs (scientists are less certain). Not one of these species originated within a thousand miles of my garden. Nor did the corn and tobacco grown in nearby farms; corn is from Mexico, tobacco from the Amazon (this species of tobacco, anyway—there was a local species that is now gone). Equally alien, for that matter, are my neighbors’ cows, horses, and barn cats. That people like me experience their gardens as familiar and timeless is a testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance). Rather than being a locus of stability and tradition, my garden is a biological record of past human wandering and exchange.2 The garden, as Mann has described it, does what he likes to do: coalesce a vast collection of scientific nuggets in a concrete and digestible way. His writing has an offhand quality to it, but I have no doubt that the diction, tone, sentence structure, parts of speech, modes of discourse, and so on—the elements of style—were carefully selected. Heavy with nouns—more than a quarter of the words here are nouns of some kind—the paragraph is visual, pointedly material. Mann chose words that are deliberately loose and

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chatty—the first-person pronouns, poppycock, and bugs—because elsewhere on the page he introduced terms like “the awkward but useful ‘transculturation,’” and he wanted to make sure that the reader wouldn’t take umbrage. The use of parentheses likewise gives the writing a conversational quality; parentheses in general effect a certain tone—a modesty, a slight apology for the impulse toward digression—that communicates eager and abashedly nerdy rather than pompous and speechifying. Mann also varied the sentence length. A few short sentences allow for surprising statements: “To biologists this must seem like poppycock,” and “Not one of these species originated within a thousand miles of my garden.” These express to the reader that the main points are not complicated. But the longer sentences are there, too, doling out the rich pieces of research like so many vegetables. There’s a willing embrace of the reader here in the firstperson plural (“our ability to operate in ignorance”) that ensures no readers will feel they are, as though they standing by, listening to a snooty lecture one can’t understand. Overall the tone is conversational and enthused, giving the reader the feeling of sitting at a picnic table with someone who has just discovered something a little complicated but amazing and who is going to do his best to contain his excitement while he explains it. Here’s a very different excerpt from an article by Inga Clendinnen: This dispiriting consensus as to Spanish invincibility and Indian vulnerability springs from the too eager acceptance of key documents, primarily Spanish but also Indian, as directly and adequately descriptive of actuality, rather than as the mythic constructs they largely are. Both the letters of Cortés and the main Indian account of the defeat of their city owe as much to the ordering impulse of imagination as to the devoted inscription of events as they occurred. Conscious manipulation, while it might well be present, is not the most interesting issue here, but rather the subtle, powerful, insidious human desire to craft a dramatically satisfying and coherent story out of fragmentary and ambiguous experience, or (the historian’s temptation) out of the fragmentary and ambiguous “evidence” we happen to have to work with.3 Right away you’ll notice some stylistic similarities that point to the kind of tone I find appealing. There’s another first-person plural here. Just as Mann

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was willing to be ignorant with his readers, Clendinnen was willing to share fragmentary and ambiguous evidence with hers. This isn’t self-effacing, it’s inclusive: we have similar obstacles, similar blindnesses. But there are also some notable differences in their styles. Clendinnen has put words together with a kind of jubilant, ferocious accuracy: “the ordering impulse of imagination” and “the subtle, powerful, insidious human desire to craft a dramatically satisfying and coherent story.” There’s no sense of chatty enthusiasm here. This is a different kind of enthusiasm: a controlled passion from which the phrases emerge with startling flawlessness. Many lines from this article have stayed with me since I first read them. The words seemed as though they were made to go together. Clendinnen hasn’t alternated sentence length here to give a clear, concise punch (although that does appear in the next paragraph). Here she allowed the length to build, so that the paragraph ends at a crescendo. The word choice is not deliberately informal or visual (there is a smaller proportion of nouns, and the nouns that do appear are more abstract), but neither does it draw heavily from a specialized academic idiom. And there’s a musicality that emerges, a gentle echo in the “invincibility” and “vulnerability,” “primarily” and “directly and adequately descriptive of actuality.” A crescendo builds in the beat as well: two syllables (“subtle”), three syllables (“powerful”), four syllables (“insidious”). If Mann has won us over with cheerful and somewhat apologetic nerdiness, Clendinnen has dazzled us with rigor. Mann wrote his book for Alfred A. Knopf, aimed at general readers, and Clendinnen wrote in the professional journal Representations for other academics. Each was clearly well aware of the target audience. These are my choices, and you might disagree, but you can examine your favorites (and unfavorites) with similar questions in mind. Word choice and word sound, parts of speech, type and length of sentences, tone and mood, and affect are all building blocks of the qualities we admire.

Practice Writing the Same Content in Different Styles Here is an exercise borrowed from a creative writing class, and it’s surprisingly effective: once you’ve pinpointed a few styles you like, you can unabashedly imitate them in order to work on your own style. I’d suggest choosing different styles for different audiences, as I’ve done here. Be sure to choose

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several; two are not enough, and five or more are even better—for example, a textbook, an article for specialists, an article for multiple disciplines, a popular book for US readers, and a scholarly book for Latin American readers. (Each category, as you can imagine, has substyles within it.) Then take a single set of ideas and content and write them out in all five styles—maybe a paragraph or a page for each. You’ll probably start by aiming for the feel of each, and when you reread you may be dissatisfied, discovering that your imitation doesn’t sound quite like the author you are emulating. If that’s the case, you’ll want to go back and scrutinize that author’s writing again. What did you miss? Something about pacing or the absence of adjectives? Something about the tone communicated by continual questions? I won’t embarrass myself with attempts to imitate Mann or Clendinnen (although I have tried), but I can show you what I mean by using two approaches to a single set of materials. My current work revolves around criminal cases from the eighteenth century in Guatemala. Using one case as a departure point, I consider related issues and contexts. Consider this introduction to the research, intended for a scholarly audience: Bookended by the brutality of the sixteenth-century conquest and the atrocities of the twentieth-century armed conflict, Guatemala’s history is easily cast as hundreds of years of cyclical violence in which even the names of the victims resurface and recur with terrible predictability. But what lies behind this characterization of a persistently violent land, a land “torn apart” by violence? How unvarying, or cyclical, or even prevalent is the violence that has come to seem so permanent? This book examines how the guided naming, neglect, delimiting, and regulation of violence by authorities in colonial Guatemala created modern “violence”: a particular, enduring conception that shaped how both state and personal actions would be perceived. Contrary to a long tradition that characterizes state violence in Guatemala as separate and categorically distinct from interpersonal violence, this research suggests that the two are not only related but interdependent. Here is a different beginning, aimed at a popular audience:

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Every murder mystery begins with a body. Or it begins with calm, an impression of serenity that promises to shatter at any moment, when the wreckage of a human life is finally revealed. A corpse. A long enmity. A sudden flash of brutality. The disruption of that initial serenity, manifested in death. Since the body that begins this story is never found, the mystery must begin with calm. It is the first of July in 1800, shortly after six in the morning. Despite the early hour, there is already movement. Servants have risen to make breakfast. The clap of hands against wet maize dough and the crackle of stove fires mix with slow morning conversations: gossip, last night’s dreams recounted and interpreted, plans made for the day. Some have already left the house to run early errands, and their bare feet patter on the street stones. The zanate birds are loud at this hour, clicking and croaking into the humid air. I’ll refrain from repeating the style analysis, but I’m guessing you can easily spot the differences. One approach frames issues and asks questions. The other tells a story and builds suspense. One references historiography; the other references murder mysteries. One is almost immediately abstract; the other is almost immediately visual. The main point of the comparison is this: writing for different audiences doesn’t just result in different styles—it results in different content. Indeed, a distinct style is distinct content. Raymond Queneau and Barbara Wright’s Exercises in Style tells the same story ninety-nine times in different ways, including through the mutually exclusive “awkward” and “casual,” “olefactory” and “gustatory,” and “haiku” and “sonnet.”4 And yet it is not the same story. Their tale of boarding a bus and witnessing an altercation takes on a new life with each telling, revealing varied content and meaning as the ninety-nine versions unfold. Reading the stories suggests that style is not just style, and the same can be observed by practicing the writing of a single idea in several distinct versions. A selfconscious patterning on the work of other authors allows for careful observation of how style is effected. In most cases, a first attempt at imitation will not successfully capture the intended style. More lies below the surface, and it

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will emerge with repeated scrutiny and imitation. From there the alternatives for developing one’s own style become clearer. Imitating different authors makes you realize how much you’re not seeing about style; it gives you more control over the style(s) you will want to develop for yourself, and it should demonstrate that distinct styles actually relate different content. You will most likely find yourself casting about for different analogies, drawing on different pieces of information, and reaching for different references when you are writing in different voices—all the more reason to practice them and choose intentionally.

Look at Your Own Writing from Before, Even Though It’s Painful Maybe looking at your own writing isn’t painful for you. Maybe you were an amazing writer by the time you wrote your first college essay, and everything you’ve ever written since then has been just as good. But if you’re anything like me, your writing has changed and (we hope) improved over time; for that reason looking back on what you wrote before can be depressing, terrifying, or hilarious. Unfortunately it’s also useful, and not only because it teaches humility. It can also teach you about style. Try the same style analysis on your old writing that you’ve done with other authors.5 What are your tendencies? Have these tendencies changed? If there’s a quality you don’t like about the writing, what is effecting that quality? If there’s a quality that you do like, do you know what’s working and how to reproduce it? In some cases I’ve had an instinctive “ugh!” reaction to my past writing, and the reaction has been so strong that I have had difficulty getting past the frustration to figure out what is responsible. In these cases (and most others, actually), it can be great to work alongside someone. Find someone who is willing to give and get a little prose analysis and exchange your writing. You might disagree with the conclusions; but even if you do, the result will help you to take a step back from your own writing, which can be hard, especially if you haven’t taken enough time away from it. And in general it is an excellent idea to get input about style. Have you asked other people about the books they most admire? Have they articulated what is admirable? Can that admirable quality be adopted?

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Being Consistent within a Single Piece of Writing Accept that no single piece of writing can do everything. This chapter, you will be shocked to hear, is full of roads not taken. There are some splendid pieces of writing that manage to reach several audiences at once, but they are splendid and manage to reach several audiences not because they reach several audiences. That is, if you set out to write with a focused and precise sense of audience, you may well come up with a very good piece. Then it may turn out that the piece is rewarding for more audiences than the one you imagined. What is always within reach is an internally consistent piece that has a constant and fully developed sense of who is reading. Think about your venue before you start writing. Research your venue’s readership. Imagine that readership as one person or a few people with very specific characteristics. Give the readers names, if that helps. Figure out what they’ve read, what they’ve studied, what kinds of books they like, what languages they speak, and what they really want to know. Practice a style that speaks to each particular person. Most important, try to think flexibly about what audiences might want to read about colonial Latin America. Once you’ve mastered three or four intentional styles that work, put them to use. Write for a local newspaper, pitch a piece to public radio, and write something a little discomfiting for your research seminar or your next scholarly book review. Don’t constrain yourself. Wouldn’t you like to know that alongside the many fantastic monographs on topics vast, minute, and justifiably obscure, there are also fantastic popular books on sugar in Cuba, crime in Buenos Aires, and nuns in Peru? I, for one, look forward to them.

Notes 1. Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens, “Lies the Debunkers Told Me: How Bad History Books Win Us Over,” Atlantic, July 24, 2012, http://www.theatlantic. com/national/archive/2012/07/lies-the-debunkers-told-me-how-bad-historybooks-win-us-over/260251/. 2. Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Vintage, 2011), xix. 3. Inga Clendinnen, “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico,” Representations, no. 33 (Winter 1991): 67.

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4. Raymond Queneau and Barbara Wright, Exercises in Style (New York: New Directions, 2009); the quoted words are all chapter titles. It thereby suggests something a little different than its partial inspiration and predecessor from 1512 does: Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: De Copia; De Ratione Studii [Foundations of the Abundant Style; On the Method of Study], ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1978). 5. When you’re working on your own writing, I recommend some edition of Richard Lanham, Revising Prose (Longman, 1999). The book can be paralyzing, because his method tends to expose bad habits (like prepositional strings, which I can never get rid of); but if you can stomach it, the result is always improved prose.

Part 4 Reckoning and Re-reckoning Same Source, Different Perspectives

Chapter 12

Confession and the Art of Reading Matthew D. O’Hara

I don’t get angry when people confess with me, so don’t be afraid, don’t be ashamed. If you don’t tell me the serious sins you’ve committed, God won’t pardon your sins and cleanse your soul, and then you might die without confessing, and the Devil will take away your soul forever.



Augustín de Quintana, a Dominican friar who worked among indigenous Mixe communities in southern New Spain, penned these lines in a confession manual written for fellow priests and published in 1733.1 In the original text, which is a fictional dialogue between a confessor and penitent, the warnings come one after another. The juxtaposition of these statements, so different in tone, captures in a few striking lines what Serge Gruzinski referred to as the “ambiguity” of the Catholic sacrament of Penance in colonial Mexico. He pointed out how confession could be a tool of domination and social control yet retain its “defensive and therapeutic” potential.2 That is, despite the great asymmetryof power between the priest and the penitent, the penitents also exercised agency in the confessional, to counter the logic of control built into the act of confession as well as to derive meaning and spiritual comfort from the ritual. Then as now, the act of confession was full of tension and potentially contradictory motivations and outcomes. Confessors and penitents alike confronted these alternatives through

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language and reading, whether actual reading or a more general interpretation of the social world they encountered. In turn, much of our knowledge about these historical practices is based on our own reading of the documents produced to support the sacrament, including the unique genre of the confession manual. Another confession manual, Advertencias para los nuevos confesores, was one of many texts produced by the Catholic clergy as part of its ministry in New Spain, which dated back to the first wave of European missionaries in the early sixteenth century. Presumably written in the late eighteenth century by a Discalced Carmelite friar, perhaps in or around the city of Valladolid (now Morelia), the manuscript is somewhat unusual for its breezy and conversational style. Rather than a formal confession manual, which tended to work methodically through a series of topics related to the confessants’ thoughts and actions, it offered an eclectic mix of opinions, advice, and warnings to future confessors, and as a result it ranges more widely in its observations than most published guidebooks to the sacrament. It also reflects the urban ministry of the Carmelites, unlike most of New Spain’s confession manuals, which were produced for priests working among indigenous communities in the countryside. Confession manuals themselves had a long history in Europe that grew out of the Catholic Church’s attempts to systematize the sacrament of Penance. Although the formal sacrament dates back to the third century, in the medieval period the rite began to take on a form much closer to its current practice. Whereas early forms of confession had often been public and collective rituals, around the twelfth century the very idea of what constituted sin began to shift, with clerics and Church authorities becoming more concerned with understanding the intentions and internal motivations of the penitents.3 Catholic theology held that the sacrament of Penance, like other sacraments such as marriage and communion, could confer the gift of grace from God, if performed correctly, and therefore it was an essential tool for achieving God’s will on earth and salvation for the faithful. Confession held an especially prominent place among the sacraments, since it offered the chance for the penitent to achieve reconciliation with the Church and to be absolved of minor (venial) and major (mortal) sins, potentially speeding one’s journey through Purgatory or saving one’s soul from the torment of Hell. In the centuries leading up to the Council of Trent (1545–1563), Church

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leaders emphasized the sacrament’s role in salvation, noted the centrality of the sacrament to a clergyman’s duties, and promoted oral confession rather than public displays of asceticism or other forms of reconciliation.4 As auricular, individualized confession became the norm, the Church stressed what we would call the psychological dimensions of the ritual, demanding that the penitent demonstrate self-reflection and contrition.5 Clerics also produced a diverse literature to support it, including treatises on canon law, encyclopedic summae confessorum, devotional works, and simple confession manuals.6 Such works became staples of early printing in New Spain, and especially those texts that supported the evangelization of Native peoples. This broader literature included grammars, dictionaries, and catechisms tailored to the region’s indigenous languages, most prominently Nahuatl but also Otomí, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Mixe, among many others. Printed confession manuals often included these other kinds of texts, since they were meant to be used in the field and to offer the confessor a bridge across the linguistic and cultural divide that separated him from potential confessants. The primary goal of all penitential literature was a good confession, a full and complete accounting of one’s sins from the time of the previous confession, since only then could the sacrament be sure to confer God’s grace. As a result many confession manuals recommended some device or tool to aid in the mental accounting of sins leading up to and during the confession. Authors commonly organized manuals around the Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, for instance, to help both the confessor and the confessant capture all possible sins as they considered the violations of any of the commandments. At the center of the practice of confession was a concern with language. The confessors worried about how to elicit productive descriptions from the penitents—that is, detailed narratives that would produce a good confession. How should one read and interpret those narratives? What techniques would keep one from being misled or deceived? We know that the confessants faced a similar set of questions: How to describe one’s past? What did the priest need to know? Should some things be concealed? As the chapters in this part of the book demonstrate, when grappling with these sources historians and other researchers confront related problems yet raise unique, though often complementary, questions of their own related to historical method and epistemology. How should we go about our research, and what is it that we are learning? How are we to read documents such as

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the Advertencias? What questions can we ask that will prompt productive responses? What pitfalls should be avoided? A related set of questions has to do with the nature of these types of sources. How should we characterize such documents? Are they a kind of early modern ethnography, in which the author’s fictional dialogues provide a window onto the actions and attitudes of the laity? Do they provide an (unintentional) autoethnography of the author and his fellow priests and friars, revealing more about their concerns and preoccupations than those of the confessants? Or should the insights we draw from these primers be limited to the practice and performance of the sacrament and the mutual readings that the clerics and the laity made of each other in the ritual itself? That is, do they best document the practice of the sacrament of Penance and its related rituals? Raising these sorts of questions is one of the great benefits of viewing a single historical source, such as the Advertencias, from a number of different vantage points. In the chapters that follow, four experienced scholars take on this task. In their work we catch a glimpse of important aspects of colonial Mexican history, yet we also get to see some fine examples of the many ways that researchers try to understand that history. This exercise in simultaneous reading offers us a seat next to the researcher. It is an opportunity to examine the research process itself, including how different methods can lead to different insights, even when drawing upon the same primary evidence. It offers us, in short, a chance to listen in on the conversations that emerge between researchers and their sources as much as on the exchanges between the confessors of colonial Mexico and their penitents. Seth Kimmel, focusing on the section in the Advertencias regarding solicitation in the confessional, notes the central role of narrative and storytelling within the confessional and what we might call the intellectual labor of the ideal confessor. Kimmel examines the author’s concern with the language used by confessants and the friar’s own narratives about his experiences in the confessional. Drawing from his field of literary criticism, Kimmel is especially attentive to the function of language conventions and genre, both in the Advertencias and in the historical sacrament of confession. Clearly, Kimmel notes, the author and his fellow confessors confronted a problem of language themselves. On the one hand, the confessor wanted to use the power of storytelling to draw out a full and complete recounting of sins since the last confession, the fundamental requirement of a good or efficacious confession, but he

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also wanted to keep subterfuge and excess from distorting the confessant’s account of his or her own history. To achieve the former without succumbing to the latter, a confessor needed to be versed in the conventions of penitential language, meaning both the ritual of confession as a genre and the particular narratives likely to be produced by different colonial types. Kimmel considers this document a guidebook to a narrative journey—in other words, a journey that was perilous but essential. It was perilous because it opened up lines of thought and interpretation that could lead to seduction, transgression, or concealment, but it was essential because only by completing such a pilgrimage could the confessor and the confessant arrive at a good confession, which conferred grace and forgiveness upon the confessant. We might say that the contemporary literary critic (Kimmel) has identified the interpretive tool kit of the early modern confessor (the Carmelite friar) and found it quite similar to his own. Jennifer Scheper Hughes also points out the risks and perils created in the confessional, but from the perspective of a scholar working in religious studies. As a result she is keen to ask questions that explore the ritual function of the sacrament, drawing on previous work in the field and on information in the Advertencias. For the sacrament to be effective the penitent needed to be self-reflective and reach a state of contrition. As Jaques Le Goff noted some years ago, this was a long-established goal of the ritual. By the thirteenth century, in fact, the confessor’s role was to probe and mold the psychological state of the penitent. The confessor’s prime concern, wrote Le Goff, “was to cleanse a person rather than chastise a fault.” 7 Yet as Hughes and some of the other contributors observe, to pursue these goals required an emotional labor. The confessor sought to balance the emotional state of the penitent, on the one hand creating a familiar and comfortable relationship that would draw out a full accounting of sins, and on the other hand probing subjects that would elicit feelings of guilt and shame and lead the penitent toward contrition. Sean McEnroe brings a somewhat different set of questions to the document, using methods that revolve around historical comparison, with the goal of understanding some of the social and cultural transformations in New Spain over the long colonial period. He finds the fictional dialogues of the confessional genre, including those found in the Advertencias, suggestive of the interactions between actual confessors and penitents, but he proposes

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that we can use such documents to understand a broader historical context. With some careful interpretation they can provide a glimpse of the world outside the confessional, a sense of the changing attitudes that clerics held about their flocks, and a sample of this society’s ongoing conversations about social norms and transgressions. Employing the classic techniques of social and cultural history, McEnroe creates a dialogue of his own, a way of reading that interprets the text (the Advertencias) based on the surrounding historical context (our existing knowledge of the period), but also a reading that uses the text to rethink that context (given that the Advertencias itself provides unique information about that context). McEnroe then makes a temporal comparison with an earlier manual from central New Spain, Don Bartolomé de Alva’s Confesionario of 1632, noting how both documents begin their interrogations by attempting to situate the confessant in a social matrix. But whereas the earlier manual emphasized the Indian-European social binary, the urban, late eighteenth-century Advertencias added the city’s multiracial masses as another broad category of confessants who required differentiated treatment in the confessional. The typecasting, as it were, continued, but it now included a wider range of potential actors. McEnroe’s comparison thus allows him to isolate information in the Advertencias that reveals something about the time and place in which it was written. Finally, Paul Ramírez uses methods similar to those of McEnroe, but in part to foreground the silences in the genre of confession manuals and to question the way that we should use such sources in historical practice. He draws our attention to a problem that most concerned the author of the Advertencias: the potential for a confessant to cover up sins, whether through dissimulation, misunderstanding, shame, or fear, all in a ritual that was meant to uncover them. Such activity is most prominent in the friar’s elaborate descriptions of deception and manipulation on the part of women in the confessional, found in the section on solicitation. Here again, Ramírez notes, the historian is faced with a dilemma of interpretation. How are we to read such descriptions? Should we take them at face value, as unproblematic descriptions of these women’s actions? Certainly this is part of what the Advertencias can offer us, but Ramírez cautions us to read the document’s silences alongside its windy descriptions of supposed social types. Women appear as agents, but only in regard to their

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sexual behavior and manipulation; otherwise we learn little of the many other roles they played or the motivations they possessed. To counter this tendency within the source Ramírez reads the Advertencias against itself, using information gleaned from other sources, such as accounts of women’s (nonsexual) deceptions during a late colonial smallpox epidemic. It is a process of contextualization akin to that employed by McEnroe, and both are reminiscent of the strategy that Robert Darnton outlined in his studies of Old Regime France.8 Once the isolated text (the Advertencias and its description of women’s deception) is situated in a broader context (other colonial texts and their information about women’s actions), we end up with a more subtle interpretation of the confessional, in which both parties took part in what Ramírez calls “a dance of revealing and concealing.” In the end deception and concealment seem less peculiar to the women described by the friar and more like tactics used rationally by many colonial subjects. These chapters all focus our attention on the strategic use of language in this document and others in the genre. None of the chapters, however, take a strongly Foucauldian approach to highlight the way that confessional discourse and practices created new understanding of sexuality. Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality and broader intellectual projects provided the framework for much of the excellent previous work on confession manuals in colonial Latin America, such as the writing of Gruzinski or Jorge Klor de Alva.9 These scholars approached the genre with a particular research agenda centered on exploring the emergence of the modern sense of self, and it influenced the questions and methods they brought to their sources. Although the present chapters note the obvious sexual content in the Advertencias and similar texts and highlight the multiple ways in which the language and practice of confession could produce sexual subjects, this does not dominate their analysis, since they are pursuing a number of other lines of inquiry that also require great attention to local context. This is evident in their focus on the interaction at the micro level, whether the so-called social genre, stage play, or dance of the confessional. Indeed, such local negotiation and dialogue was the very substance of Penance, although on the surface the Advertencias captures only one side of the conversation, that of the confessor. This paradox, of course, is true of so many historical sources, especially those drawn from times and places of great social hierarchy and limited literacy. The four scholars in this part of the book

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provide us with different but complementary strategies and methods for beginning to recuperate that semisilenced dialogue in all its richness and complexity. Quintana, the author of the Mixe confession manual and grammar, reminded his fellow confessors that mastery of the language provided untold opportunities to probe the lives of their confessants. His manual did not provide every question one might ask in the language of Mixe, Quintana explained, but rather taught Mixe itself, “so you can ask everything.” 10 But, of course, if one asked everything, so too could the reply be anything. Conversations could be hard to manage, even in their afterlife as part of the historical record. These real and imagined dialogues offer us many voices and untold stories of Mexico’s early history.

Notes 1. Augustín de Quintana, Confessonario en lengua Mixe (Puebla, Mexico: Viuda de Miguel Ortega, 1733). 2. Serge Gruzinski, “Individualization and Acculturation: Confession among the Nahuas of Mexico from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 111. “Doubtless,” he wrote, “the practice of confession became a refined tool of ideological subjection and of dominion over the individual,” but it also “offered a structure of support and comfort amidst the disturbances of deculturation. In other words, confession became a defensive and therapeutic mechanism, capable of appeasing not only the anguish raised by its own practice but also the traumas generated by colonial rule.” See also Serge Gruzinski, ed., “Confesión, alianza, y sexualidad entre los indios de la Nueva España (Introducción al estudio de los confesionarios en lenguas indígenas),” in El Placer de pecar y el afán de normar (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987), 169–215; and Serge Gruzinski, “La ‘conquista de los cuerpos,’” in Familia y sexualidad en la Nueva España (Simposio de la historia de las mentalidades), ed. Solange Alberro (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982), 177–206. On the Andes, see Regina Harrison, “The Theology of Concupiscence: Spanish-Quechua Confessional Manuals in the Andes,” in Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America, ed. Francisco Javier Cevallos-Candaua, Jeffrey A. Cole, Nina M. Scott, and Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 135–52; and Regina Harrison, Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru: SpanishQuechua Penitential Texts, 1565–1650 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). 3. Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 11.

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4. The decrees issued at Trent confirmed these practices and earlier Church directives, such as those issued at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which mandated a yearly confession for all the faithful. Dionisio Borobio, “The Tridentine Model of Confession in its Historical Context,” in The Fate of Confession, ed. Mary Collins and David Noel Power (Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1987), 22–32; Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1988), 186. 5. Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 52; Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life, 12. 6. Tentler, Sin and Confession, 28–35. 7. Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life, 12. 8. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 9. Gruzinski, “Individualization and Acculturation”; Gruzinksi, “Confesión, alianza, y sexualidad”; Gruzinski, “La ‘conquista de los cuerpos’ ”; Jorge Klor de Alva, “Colonizing Souls: The Failure of the Indian Inquisition and the Rise of Penitential Discipline,” in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3–22; Jorge Klor de Alva, “Sin and Confession among the Colonial Nahuas: The Confessional as a Tool for Domination,” in La ciudad y el campo en la historia de México, ed. Eric Van Young and Gisela Von Wobeser (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1992), 91–101. 10. Quintana, Confessonario.

Chapter 13

Solicitation Stories

Reading Confession between History and Literature



Seth Kimmel

The privacy of confession creates the possibility for truthfulness. Confessors inquire about the sins of penitents in order to help them tell the complete and honest story of their own sinfulness. Narration produces absolution. As the late eighteenth-century confession manual Advertencias para los nuevos confesores demonstrates, however, Carmelite confessors in colonial Mexico knew that the moment of confessional storytelling was not simply an opportunity for the candid review and forgiveness of personal sinfulness; it was also an occasion for further transgression.1 Especially when advising confessors about how to question female penitents, the anonymous author of the Advertencias acknowledged the danger posed by the privacy of the confessional, on the one hand, and by the oblique and suggestive qualities of language and narration, on the other hand. He asked a thorny question: How should a confessor deal with those penitents who use confession to seduce the confessor? 2 In answering this question, the author of the Advertencias demonstrated an awareness that to control corruption and misinterpretation in confession was to consider various problems in reading a narrative. He told a story about a confessor friend who was nearly seduced by several women from his flock. He allowed his readers to experience elements of his friend’s near seduction in order to inoculate them against the real thing. Moreover, in forcing his readers to interpret the lively short story, he also demonstrated how and why virtuous confessors and penitents must be attentive

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to linguistic ambiguity and narrative polysemy in their interpretations of actual confessional narratives. Confessors must not misinterpret an honest confession of lascivious thoughts for an illicit proposal or misread an attempted seduction as an honest confession, for instance. They similarly must be on guard against both good-faith and flirtatious accusations of sollicitatio ad turpia, the technical name for clerical-initiated “solicitation into filthiness,” for the indirectness of sexual innuendo and legalese alike can lead to all manner of misunderstanding, accusation, and denial, not to mention actual sexual misconduct.3 In helping his readers to cultivate their literary acuity and to recognize the narrative conditions of ritually effective confession, the author of the Advertencias struggled to marshal the transformative power of storytelling and to control its potentially aberrant consequences.4 The identification and interpretation of these interwoven narratological and pedagogical aspects of the Advertencias is this chapter’s principal finding. This discovery is a product of reading the Advertencias in particular and colonial history more generally with the eye of a literary critic, which, not coincidentally, is also how the author of the Advertencias came to understand and share his sophisticated take on confession itself. Although much of the Advertencias contains systematic and precise advice to confessors, the section on solicitation instead opens with a secondhand story, supposedly told to the author by his confessor friend. “I knew a member of my order who was solicited by three women,” the provocative account begins. Each of these three women confesses, in both the ecclesiastical and romantic senses of that word, to having illicit thoughts about the author’s friend. The first, after some prodding, tells the confessor that she loves him. The second woman admits only to having had “un pensamiento impuro” (an impure thought) about the confessor. Perhaps the confessor does not need further hints to imagine what that thought might be, for the second woman’s language is more open-ended and ambiguous than the first woman’s. She leaves room for denial. The third woman reveals that she “had felt tempted by him many times.” She lets the web of sexual and biblical associations of the word temptation, even when draped in the language of self-accusation, do the subtle work of solicitation.5 If incidents like these were to happen to you, the author advised his colleagues, the prudent course of action would be to refuse the women

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absolution. Moreover, the author continued, you should tell them that if they were sincere in their desire to confess their sins, they should offer their confessions to a different confessor. This was perfectly reasonable advice expressed with pedagogical and narrative nuance: the author put his readers on guard by entangling them in these scenes of solicitation, and he then helped them out of the potential quagmire by outlining an effective response to such trickery. The turn toward storytelling in this section of the Advertencias is crucial because it alerts the readers to language and narrative as ecclesiastical concerns. The author underscored these concerns by leaving his audience temporarily hanging about the fate of his confessor friend. Did the confessor succumb to the solicitations of these women, or did he act in accordance with the advice of the author of the Advertencias? In other words, was this story an example of how to act or a warning about how not to act? The author here echoed the uncertainty often found in the medieval and early modern Iberian exempla collections, or frame-tale narratives.6 In this tradition of didactical storytelling, accounts of sexual misconduct served to warn, educate, and entertain readers. In this particular case the story of solicitation was designed to help confessors recognize an attempted seduction. Seeing the women’s false confessions for the solicitations that they were, a confessor may have been able to stop and punish them before they had a chance to develop. But this kind of story, told in the semiprivate genre of a confession manual whose limited audience included fellow confessors, also provided a welcome moment of insider levity. As if following Horace’s famous precept along with the frame-tale paradigm, this story delighted as well as instructed.7 Indeed, the account of these three women’s solicitations was one of a very few number of passages that were carefully underlined in the manuscript. Perhaps this early reader recognized the importance of the unfinished story as a warning about the dangers of duplicitous language, or perhaps he simply enjoyed the manual’s most racy bits. The author of the Advertencias demonstrated that stories are subject to contradictory interpretations. To the extent that confession is a private scene of Church-sanctioned personal narrative, this story of solicitation was a warning about the dangers of confession more generally. The prospect of confessor corruption was the cloud that hung over confession. The corruption of one confessor threatened to undermine the sacrament of confession as a whole. By telling

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a story, the author of the Advertencias sought to buttress the legitimacy of confession against these grave anxieties, but he also ended up reminding his readers that the confessional can be a place of seduction as well as sacredness. He may even have given his fellow clergymen some unholy ideas. I am interested in how and why this tension between literature’s edifying and corruptive qualities occupied the author of the Advertencias. Literature’s capacity to produce both sacred and profane action had a public as well as private dimension, even in the case of confession. The interpretive and professional challenge posed by seductive penitents, warned the author of the Advertencias, extended beyond the private interactions of the confessional. As the author’s friend told him, at least one of those previously mentioned seductive women reacted angrily to being accused of solicitation. She then proceeded to raise the seductive stakes: “She afterward made so many efforts to ambush the purity of the confessor, even pretending that she was sick in bed [hasta hacerse enferma] and calling for him to hear her confession.” 8 A private bedside confession at the woman’s own house? If the confessor were to visit the woman’s home, how is he—or anyone else in the community, for that matter—to know whether such an act would lead to absolution bestowed by a dedicated pastor or the lascivious completion of a seductive plot? The Advertencias’s language of the account was ambiguous: Hacerse enferma might have meant that the woman merely pretended to be sick in order to continue her attempted seduction, as the above translation suggests. But it may also have meant that the woman became so upset at the false accusation against her of solicitation that she actually became sick. The author finally related that his confessor friend was unwilling to risk his reputation by going to the woman’s bedside. The moral of the story is that it was better for confessors who suspected seductive penitents to err on the side of caution. However counterintuitive, the integrity of the sacrament of confession required confessors to overread the language of sexual suggestion. Dirty minds served holy ends. As the remainder of the section on solicitation admits, however, confessors had to find an interpretive middle ground that allowed for both suspicion and sincerity. There was danger in both naïveté and cynicism. It was possible to suspect evil, the author acknowledged, “where there is no need to suspect.” 9 An axiomatic question for confessors, then, was this: Should a

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confessor be a charitable interpreter of penitential stories? The confessor’s legitimacy, along with the efficacy of the sacrament itself, hinged upon finding a flexible answer to this question. For the charity of the interpreter depended on the story and the storyteller. It depended, as a literary critic might point out, on genre. We know how to read a story because of its generic and material markers. Our expectations change depending on whether a story is an exemplum from a medieval collection of animal fables like Calila e Dimna, a bedtime tale by Roald Dahl, or a science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, to pick just three examples. So too with reading the confessions of penitents, which is why the Advertencias was organized demographically. Like the division of literary genres, the taxonomy of penitents provided confessors with a guide to inquiry and interpretation. The seductive penitent threatened to undermine the authority of the confessor and the efficacy of confession. The author of the Advertencias signaled this menace only obliquely, like his friend’s third seductress, through a story that his readers had to interpret for themselves. He put his audience into this tantalizing position in order to teach and entertain. Having been lured into his story of seduction, the author implied, you would know how to resist the real thing if you encountered it. To learn to read and interpret was to open the path of corruption to fellow confessors, but it was also to give them the tools to avoid heading down that path. The author’s story of seduction suggests an awareness among the pragmatic pastors in eighteenth-century Mexico that the efficacy of confession rested at least as much upon literary discernment as on ecclesiastical protocol. Although our goals as modern scholars obviously differ from those of colonial confessors, making one’s way through the methodological crossroads of literature and history is as central to our craft as it was to theirs. This is one of the Advertencias’s most useful lessons.

Notes 1. Advertencias para los nuevos confesores, Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de San Alberto de los Carmelitas Descalzos, Carpeta 1669. 2. Overlapping concerns about rhetoric and sex in the context of confession are as old as St. Augustine’s Confessions, but for an overview of the relevant canon law and an account of early modern efforts to control abuse of the sacrament, largely by confessors rather than penitents, see William Fanning, “Solicitation,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent, http://www.newadvent.org/

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cathen/14134b.htm; Jorge René González Marmolejo, Sexo y confesión: La iglesia y la penitencia en los siglos XVIII y XIX en la Nueva España (Plaza Valdés, Mexico: Conaculta-INAH, 2002), 15–45; Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3–41, 86–104; and Adelina Sarrión Mora, Sexualidad y confesión: La solicitación ante el Tribunal del Santo Oficio (siglos XVI-XIX) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1994), 11–20. Sarrión Mora, Sexualidad y confesión, 57–107; González Marmolejo, Sexo y confesión, 88–90. The word effective captures the meaning of the Latin ex opere operato, a technical legal phrase that describes the spiritual and pragmatic product of an accurately celebrated sacrament. Pope Innocent III popularized the phrase in the thirteenth century, and the Council of Trent reconfirmed the concept in the sixteenth century. Innocent III, De missarum mysteriis, bk. 3, chap. 5. Advertencias, 49. For an introduction to this multilingual tradition, see David Wacks, Framing Iberia: Maqāmāt and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 1–15. On the parallel problem of exemplarity and interpretation in Renaissance history and literature, see Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1–30. Horace, The Epistles of Horace: A Bilingual Edition, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 175. Advertencias, 51. Ibid., 52.

Chapter 14

Ritual, Intimacy, and Emotion in Sacramental Spaces



Jennifer Scheper Hughes

In the history of Mexican Catholicism, the Spanish (or criollo) priest and the indigenous (or mestizo) parishioner are like intimate others to each other. Today, when we imagine these two historical personae, we often think of the radically incommensurate worlds they occupied. Layperson and priest did engage each other as opposites on important and very real divides: the marginalized, impoverished colonial subject, on the one hand, and the ecclesial administrator and bureaucrat who was an instrument of colonial subjugation, on the other. At the same time that the relationship between priest and laity was marked by distinctions and inequalities, a close reading of the historical record reveals the ways in which the association was also intimate, proximate, and familiar. I am a scholar of religion who is also a historian. As I occupy the boundary between these two fields, my commitment is to draw forth from seemingly unlikely archival sources the intimate, embodied, and experiential religious worlds inhabited by ordinary believers. The first disciplinary commitment of the religious studies scholar is to interpretive proximity to our subjects, rather than distance, as Robert Orsi reminds us.1 Therefore, I bring to the analysis of the Advertencias para los nuevos confesores, the late eighteenth-century confession manual written for the use of Father José de los Angeles, a particular set of questions about the qualitative character of lived religious experience and, in particular, the ritual function of confession as one of the intimate and

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shared worlds that priests and parishioners occupied and indeed created together.2 I am also attentive to the affective dimension of religious experience, the religious emotions that marked Christian practice and piety in particular cultural and historical moments. What this means is that even as I explore the ways in which religious rituals functioned as a form of social regulation and control in the colonial setting, I simultaneously take seriously the authentic faith of both lay believers and their priests as they work to make meaning in and of the world. Taking as a starting point the category of religious experience, I want to know what emotions both priests and parishioners felt (and were supposed to feel) in their religious practice. This allows me to observe more clearly the shifting proximity and distance between priests and believers and to pause, especially, to observe the overlapping spiritual and ritual zones in which the two encountered each other, face-to-face, in a shared religious world. In late eighteenth-century Mexico, race, power, class, status, culture, and institutional authority separated priest from parishioner. The Advertencias clearly emphasizes and reinscribes the divisions of caste and class. Throughout the document, the nuance, discipline, emotional control, and intelligence of the father confessor appears in contrast to the “slight capacity” of the “simple people” with “little aptitude.” 3 The author’s neat categorizations of the laity into key social groupings functions similarly to relegate the mass of laypeople to a subordinated status: “ignorant people” (gente ignorante), “vile people” (gente ruin), “Indians” (indios), “prostitutes” (rameras), and the like.4 The category of vile people, a highly racialized term, is further subdivided into “mulattoes,” blacks, workers, those who are poorly raised, vagabonds (or itinerants), lepers, and the otherwise “despised.” 5 The assignation of the large population of laypeople (penitents) to stigmatized categories and classes functioned to set them apart from clerics and other “officials” and reified potent divisions and inequalities within the colonial social order.6 Anthropologist Jorge Klor de Alva has explored how power inequalities play out in religious rituals in his study of the shaping of a confessorial consciousness among Indians in the first century after the Spanish conquest. Klor de Alva argues that within the context of the colonial endeavor, the purpose of the sacrament of confession was to “affect . . . each word, thought, and deed of every individual Indian,” ultimately for purposes of social

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control.7 Thus, the missionary friars carefully cultivated a self-scrutinizing consciousness in which Indians were, in theory, to learn to methodically examine their memories, evaluating the smallest behavior and action and fleeting thought for transgression. One by one these transgressions were then fully disclosed to Spanish priests. That Indians should engage in this self-scrutinizing practice and then ultimately find themselves to be guilty was one of the goals of Christian evangelization. The function of confession as an instrument of surveillance and social control continued to the close of the colonial period and beyond. This is clearly evident in the Advertencias, in which particular lines of questioning about domestic life, child rearing, marriage, and sexual practice are described. These include priestly queries about the work ethic, labor practices, and responsibility for educating children in Christian doctrine—topics that may have more to do with enforcing social norms than monitoring individual and personal sins and peccadilloes. At the same time that the relationship between priest and laity was marked by distinctions and inequalities, the social role of ritual was also, often precisely, to subvert the social order. In one of the more intriguing sections of the Advertencias, the padre recommends a ritual exercise that would seem to destabilize seemingly entrenched social and religious distinctions. In this exercise new confessors are instructed to practice the sacrament with one another, with each taking a turn at the role of priest and penitent. According to the manual’s prescriptions, the priest playing the role of penitent must temporarily shed his priestly identity and wholly assume and embody the identity of his penitent—whether it be an Indian, an ignorant person, a boy, a thief, or a prostitute.8 Through this act of ritual inversion, in which the priest inhabits the role of the indigenous lay penitent, he becomes a more effective confessor. In the process the line between cleric and laity is partially transgressed, even if only temporarily. Thus a close reading of the document reveals the ways in which the ritual relationship between priest and parishioner both drew on and created familiarity and proximity. Priests and laypeople inhabited a shared religious and social world. From the period of early Christian evangelization in the sixteenth century, Spanish friars and indigenous converts lived together in small cities and villages where each other’s individual habits, routines, and personalities were familiar. Churches, plazas, and village streets were shared

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sacred, public, and collective spaces where priests and parishioners encountered each other in the daily context of religious rituals and more mundane tasks. Priests and friars made pastoral visits to individual homes, where they anointed the sick, counseled their flock, and consulted on parish matters. This familiarity was intentional and by design, even during the period in question, as parish priests were exhorted to “govern with love and affection, to be familiar, humane teachers and edifying examples.” 9 The rite of confession was perhaps the most intensely intimate and familiar space shared by priests and parishioners. This is clearly evident in the Advertencias, whose author was keenly attuned to social mores and norms as he strove to interpret poor parishioners’ (“simple peoples’”) gestures, moods, and emotions for priests who were new to confession. I see this, for example, quite transparently in the senior priest’s careful description of the specificity and particularity of local linguistic meanings and speech patterns. For example, he astutely described the various meanings of “No, Padre” or even “Si,” for people of poorer, “ruder,” classes. “No, Padre” is often the answer to only one part (the final part) of a longer question. Or it can mean, “I don’t understand the question.” 10 “Yes” can be an answer to a question or an indication of deference. The possibility of misunderstanding and linguistic slippage between confessor and penitent figures prominently in the document. Also salient is the document’s discussion of shame (verguenza) as one of the greatest obstacles to a thorough confession.11 There is a range of emotions that a penitent may bring to confession, and the author displayed a great familiarity with and a nuanced understanding of these feelings. Therefore, although surveillance and social control were surely at work in the Advertencias, the manual’s attention and focus are on shaping a precise emotional context for the confessional relationship. I believe that the process of Christian evangelization in Mexico was centered on the communication of Christian emotions to communities of converted Indians and their descendants. That is, the Christianization of the Americas was, quite fundamentally, the construction of an “affective regime” requiring that new Christian subjects actually feel different in their reoriented religious practice. Almost two hundred years later, the theme of emotion, specifically religious affect, dominated the Advertencias. As the author labored to define the appropriate emotional content and affective postures of confession, he explored those feelings that were the most dangerous for the penitent,

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including wariness, distrust, bashfulness, timidity, and shame. These emotions could cause the penitent to remain quiet instead of proffering an honest confession. By displaying gentleness, patience, and affability, the confessor had to make every effort to put the penitent at ease so that a full confession could be made.12 The priest was not supposed do anything that would make the parishioner feel humiliated or embarrassed. The display of strong emotions, especially condemnation, surprise, or shock, was to be completely avoided, as were annoyance and exacerbation. I would suggest that emotional or affective precision in sacramental spaces was one of the primary concerns of the author of the Advertencias. I have observed the intimacy and transgressive potency of the confessional for an earlier period, when, in the midst of demographic and cultural collapse wrought by epidemic disease, indigenous survivors of these epidemics brought their grief and despair to parish priests in confession. Those who had survived their families and communities confided in their priests in the intimate space of confession that they too had lost the will to live and desired to die. In 1580 Fray Juan de Santa Catarina observed, “Considering the great affliction of the Indians, many times confessing them they have told me and certified that they are so destroyed and so disadvantaged . . . that they desire death a thousand times over.” 13 That the confessional was a place where indigenous Christians communicated despair at their suffering under colonial rule and where priests were expected to hold, respond to, and pardon the indigenous “will to death” in periods of demographic and social crisis must have sometimes destabilized and unsettled the capacity of confession as an instrument of discipline and social control. Religious rituals are as perilous as they are potent; as instable and unwieldy as they are ordered, organized, and regimented. In the setting of colonial Mexico, confession was a profoundly ambivalent act. The inherent risks are precisely what created a pressing need for the careful regulation of confession through detailed guidelines and thorough instruction and preparation. In titling his document Advertencias, which means “words of caution,” the author highlighted the risk inherent in the sacrament of confession. The genre of the confessional manual was a key instrument for the creation of bounded ritual spaces, potent areas that were secured and regulated precisely to allow for the kinds of intimate and risky conversations described in the Advertencias.

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Notes 1. Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 2. Advertencias para los nuevos confesores, Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de San Alberto de los Carmelitas Descalzos, Carpeta 1669. 3. Ibid., 16, 18. 4. Ibid., 1–2. 5. Ibid., 23. 6. Ibid., 10–12. 7. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Colonizing Souls: The Failure of the Indian Inquisition and the Rise of Penitential Discipline,” in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 12. 8. Advertencias, 2. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 23. 11. Ibid., 96. 12. Ibid., 6–7. 13. Archivo General de Indias, Cartas y expedientes de personas eclesiasticas, 285, October 24, 1580, 1v.

Chapter 15

A Confusion of Tongues or the Want of Schooling



A Carmelite Vision of Humble Penitents Sean f. McEnroe

Meaningful historical inquiry begins when the spare facts of the documentary record help us envision a more complete social reality. Maps, artwork, and archaeological excavation allow us to glimpse the physical spaces in which historical actors operated. But how are we best able to imagine the social environments that permitted or constrained individual choice and action? Confession manuals are exciting historical sources because they allow us to peer into the private relationship between confessor and penitent and because they reveal clergymen’s understanding of the relationship between the individual and the larger community. Sin, confession, penance, absolution, and communion describe in theological terms a social process by which the individual is first excluded from and then reunited with the community.1 Since the parish was the most universally intelligible small political community in colonial Mexico, the process of excluding the sinner from communion and brokering his or her return to the Eucharist was effectively a description of the rules governing spiritual citizenship. Confession manuals like the 1796 Advertencias para los nuevos confesores describe not just the beliefs and conduct required for inclusion but also the social types or corporate communities that the parish comprised.2 One of the most striking features of early modern confession manuals is that they are so often written in the form of a script.3 The authors of these manuals provided general counsel to confessors accompanied by extensive

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examples of typical confessional dialogue. The readers of these manuals experienced something akin to a stage play in which the characters represented common social types. More than any other written genre, the script comes closest to describing the matrix of social choices in which the individual operates; and this is undoubtedly why confession manuals were written in this form. Scripts differ from most genres of writing by being uncentered—that is, the reader is permitted to imagine him- or herself in any role. In the case of these early confession manuals, the scripts tell us a great deal about clergymen’s perceptions of normal and abnormal behavior among colonial society’s varied caste and class communities. No one had so intimate a knowledge of the private lives of so many community members as the confessors did. Thus the changing contents of confession manuals over time allow us to glimpse ground-level changes in social reality.4 The similarities between dramatic literature and colonial confession manuals should not surprise us. After all, several authors of these manuals were also playwrights who penned didactic dramas for feast days. Both genres linked performance and instruction. The manuals describe a social interaction in which confessor and penitent are able to improvise, but only within narrowly prescribed roles. The penitent’s role is defined in a large measure by sex, age, ethnicity, and profession. This seems compatible with a coeval vision of Christendom as the sum of its corporate constituents. Individuals entered the confessional not just as Christians but as Christians of a certain type. The manuals, then, offer us a kind of social taxonomy, and the changes in those manuals over time reveal how the clergy understood the changing demographic environment.5 In New Spain, early guides to confession focused on the Indian population. Often bilingual or trilingual, these manuals sought to translate Christian beliefs across cultures. The guides were concerned with finding linguistic equivalence but also reflected the very different concerns of missionary confessors in early colonial Mexico and their counterparts in Europe. European priests of the sixteenth century were deeply concerned with Protestant heresies while their contemporaries in the New World were concerned with instructing and persuading penitents to avoid pre-Christian religious practices. In early colonial New Spain, the clergy feared indigenous religious revival above all else, and consequently organized the confession manuals around the distinctly different spiritual dangers faced by Indians and Spaniards.6

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In the early 1630s Don Bartolomé de Alva, a mestizo priest of elite Nahua ancestry (and the brother of the more famous Fernando Ixtlilxochitl), wrote two guides to confession in parallel Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl text. They offer a snapshot of how the Church conceived of Mexico’s multiethnic society after the first century of missionary efforts.7 His Confessionario mayor y menor en lengua Mexicana divides colonial society into Spanish and Indian spheres, then further divides the Indian community by sex, station, and calling. The guide’s model dialogue opens with the standard question, “How long has it been since your last confession?”, but the second and third questions are different from those that might be heard in a modern confessional. They are attempts by the cleric to place the penitent in a social category that will shape the rest of the enquiry. He asks, “What is your job? How do you make your living?” The manual furnishes the most likely possibilities: governor, councilman, painter, carpenter, stonemason, agricultural worker. The next line of questioning addresses the person’s sex and marital status, soliciting answers like “I am married,” “I am a widow,” “I am single,” or “I am a maiden.” Finally, the questioner tries to determine the penitent’s education in the faith: “Do you know spiritual things? The four [prayers] and [fourteen] articles of faith?” 8 Manuals like this one offer a gift to the social historian: they tell us what categories of caste, class, and vocation existed in a given time and place, and they allow us to surmise from the line of questioning both the ideal model of conduct for each group and the actual daily social behaviors that departed from this ideal. The manuals indicate a clear expectation that people of the same social type were usually guilty of the same transgressions. Although the second, 1634 manual makes quick work of sins like murder and theft, offering little in the way of exemplary dialogue, its attention to sexual transgressions and pagan religious practice is meticulous. The voice of the priest hammers away relentlessly at idolatrous practices. Here is one such passage: Your neighbors the Spaniards who greatly exceed you in spiritual and earthly goods, whom none of you equal, do they walk around warming idols, dolls and little creatures? . . . Do you believe that they [the idols] come and go from the mountain Tlaloc and from other high and lofty mountains; [that] when the rainy season begins they become overcast and touch the clouds, and so by the heat of the sun and the moisture of

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the earth vaporize and condense into clouds and water, etc? And are you very convinced that this does not happen except through idols, and that they produce the rain storms?9 This exhaustive (and exhausting) line of questioning forces the Indian listener to survive a rather precise litmus test for sin and heterodoxy. The voice of the priest is that of both inquisitor and pedant. It reflects an obsession with rooting out crypto-paganism and with educating imperfect Christians to become orthodox ones. Early on, the missionary church in Mexico had a conflicting set of attitudes toward its new Indian members. John Leddy Phelan famously pointed out that early Franciscans often saw a special role for Indians in the unfolding of Christian history and in the final conversion of the earth’s people. Founding missionaries of the sixteenth century like Geronimo de Mendieta found Indians especially receptive to the divine word.10 Yet the psychology at work in the seventeenth-century Confessionario mayor y menor and the eighteenth-century Advertencias para los nuevos confesores seems closer to Inga Clendinnen’s portrait of Diego de Landa than to Phelan’s portrait of Mendieta. Landa was a man desperate to save the souls of his Indian charges, but he was also obsessed with the idea that their transgressions, shaped by the wiles of Satan, would conform to his expectations about idolatry and blasphemy. Landa’s Indians had a kind of tragic flaw that dictated a particular script of transgression and redemption.11 Like early works of criminology, the manuals posit something like a “criminal type.” Once the type is identified, the moral failings of the penitent are easily guessed.12 The methods of confessional interrogation employed by the Church long remained rooted in the habits acquired in the time of conversion and pagan persecutions. A set of attitudes first developed in relation to Indians was, by the late colonial period, extended to a variety of social groups. The persistent interrogation modeled in Advertencias para los nuevos confesores seems less about determining the truth than about forcing the penitent to disclose a truth already known by the questioner. In this way it resembles the investigations of Diego de Landa or those of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Each social type was expected to manifest a predictable moral flow and to present distinct challenges in the course of questioning: merchants tended to avarice, servants to theft, mulattoes to drunkenness and violence, and farmworkers

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to sloth; teenagers had wandering wits, and Indians stumbled over language and were prone to dishonesty. The dialogue aimed to achieve a higher degree of both spiritual education and social regulation.13 In both confession manuals (the Advertencias and the Confessionario) there is an assumption that penitents will misunderstand questions or dissemble in predictable ways. The Confessionario cautions that Indians, when asked how many times they have engaged in a sexual sin, always answer “two or three times” even if they have engaged in the sin persistently for years. This seems an intentional obfuscation, but other failed inquests are attributed to the Indians’ poor command of language or muddled thinking. The Advertencias cautions readers that Indian penitents are unable to follow a long chain of questions. If one asks three questions in a row, the Indian is apt to answer only the last one. Although the two guides have similar expectations about Indian penitents, the Advertencias dwells on the limitations of other social groups as well. The section “Coarse and Ignorant People” includes some of the same instructions as those given for Indians: “with gente ruda (rough people), one should not ask them questions that have two or three clauses; because they either will not respond or will respond only to the last clause.” 14 We learn what sorts of people fall into the category of gente ruda: “this class includes the teenagers, Indians, many gente ruin [vile people], and various others known for their little talent, crude ingenuity, and lack of necessary education.” 15 The instructions for dealing with these groups suggest using simple language, presenting multiple iterations of the same idea, and using devotional images to communicate theological concepts to the unlettered. Clearly, the broad distinction between Indians and Spaniards was less important to the author than the distinction between the more and less enlightened members of each caste community.16 In the century and a half that separates the two manuals, there was a striking change in clerical writers’ understanding of the social origins of confusion or dishonesty. Perhaps the most detailed discussion of the topic in the Advertencias occurs in the section on gente ruin. This much maligned group included “peddlers, mulattoes, blacks, porridge eaters, millworkers, lazy people of bad upbringing, vagrants, lepers, and the despicable.” 17 This is an interesting set of social descriptors that mixes traits of ethnicity, class, and profession. We are told that the members of this heterogeneous and benighted

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group tell stories like those of blind men and rarely confess. The line of questioning for such people features a strong attention to drinking, fighting, and wife beating, and it requires the confessor to acquire a specialized pornographic lexicon for discussions of sexual vice. Notably, the first section on gente ruin does not include Indians, although a subsequent passage gives instructions for speaking to “gente ruin and also to the Indians.” 18 Like early missionary explanations of Indian transgression, the Advertencias sometimes presents a sympathetic attitude toward the innocent transgressions of the uneducated, but at other times takes a hard line regarding their moral defects. The changes to urban demography in the eighteenth century required a general reorganization of clerical notions of social hierarchy. By the 1790s a place like Valladolid was no longer intelligible merely as a place of contact between the European and Indian worlds. The city was thronged with people of all shades and extractions. The clergymen were fully aware of this new reality, yet their confessional practices remained marked by habits acquired in the long colonial history of (at least theoretically) separate Spanish and Indian republics.19 The Advertencias suggests that very old habits and attitudes for dealing with Indian penitents were now extended to new social groups. In the 1790s education, literacy, and class were clearly overtaking language and caste as the principle markers of social status. Whereas the Confessionario (1634) struggled to reach out across the cultural gap that separated Spaniards from Indians, the Advertencias (1796) struggled to reach out across the gulf that divided the respectable classes of late colonial Mexican cities from the much larger and more ethically complex underclass.

Notes 1. On confession and community in the early modern Catholic world, see John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 4–5. Church thinking on the spiritual process of confession and absolution found early expression in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215; see “Fourth Lateran Council,” in Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales, ed. John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer (1938; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 412–41. 2. Advertencias para los nuevos confesores, Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de San Alberto de los Carmelitas Descalzos, Carpeta 1669. On the application of

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European confession practices to communities in New Spain by regular clergy, see Karen Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 122–29. The same scripted form of instruction and the same notion that penitents can be grouped by social or professional type appears in Hermenegildo Vilaplana, Centinela dogmatico-moral con oportunos avisos al confessor, y penitente (Mexico City: Biblioteca Mexicana, 1767). On confession as a mode of narrative, see Mary Flowers Braswell, The Medieval Sinner: Characterization and Confession in Literature of the English Middle Ages (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1983). The narratives and dialogues of confessional manuals has been described as “telenovelesque.” Thus literature borrows from the praxis of confession while didactic confession manuals also drew from the techniques of literature. Barry D. Sell, “Perhaps Our Lord, God, Has Forgotten Me: Intruding into the Colonial Nahua (Aztec) Confessional,” in The Conquest All Over Again: Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism, ed. Susan Schroeder (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 181–205. On didactic performances in indigenous communities, see Louise M. Burkhart, ed., Aztecs on Stage: Religious Theater in Colonial Mexico, trans. Louise M. Burkhart, Barry D. Sell, and Stafford Poole (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011); Louise M. Burkhart and Barry D. Sell, eds., Nahuatl Theater (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004–2009), vols. 1–4. In addition to using public performances, missionaries employed a variety of nonverbal and extraverbal means of communication for confession and instruction. Osvaldo Pardo, “Bárbaros y mudos: Comunicación verbal y gestual en la confesión de los nahuas,” Colonial Latin American Review 5, no. 1 (1996): 25–53. Serge Gruzinski, “Individualization and Acculturation: Confession among the Nahuas of Mexico from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in The Church in Colonial Latin America, ed. John Frederick Schwaller (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 103–29. John Schwaller, “Don Bartolomé de Alva: Nahuatl Scholar of the Seventeenth Century,” in A Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican Language, 1634, ed. Barry D. Sell and John Frederick Schwaller with Lu Ann Homza (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 3–15; Amber Brian, “Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Narratives of the Conquest of Mexico: Colonial Subjectivity and the Circulation of Native Knowledge,” in Schroeder, Conquest All Over Again, 124–43. Bartolomé de Alva, Confessionario mayor y menor en lengua Mexicana (1634), in Sell and Schwaller with Homza, Guide to Confession, 71–72. A full digitized version of the original text is available from the John Carter Brown Library, https://archive.org/details/confessionarioma00alva.

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9. Ibid., 78–79. 10. John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), 44-58. 11. Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquest: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517– 1570, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 161–89. 12. This idea of typical flaws or criminal types has deeps roots and lasting effects in European and colonial history. In this chapter I argue that the late colonial period in New Spain witnessed a shift away from a caste-based perspective on typical flaws. For a discussion of the later reemergence and modification of caste-based thinking in the era of scientific racism, see Joshua Goode, “Corrupting a Good Mix: Race and Crime in Late Nineteenth- and Early TwentiethCentury Spain,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2005): 241–65. 13. Carlo Borromeo’s 1574 Advertenze for confessors shows the Tridentine Era shift toward understanding confession as a quasi-judicial process and as an instrument for social control and policing orthodoxy. Wietse De Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Boston: E. J. Brill, 2001). On confession as social control, see Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). On confession as one of several social controls along with instruction and exemplary punishment, see William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), chap. 9. The social control function of confession expressed in the confession manuals is echoed in those of Inquisition proceedings, whether carried out by bishops or the Holy Office. John Chuchiak, The Inquisition in New Spain, 1536–1820 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); David Tavárez, The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 14. Advertencias, 32. 15. Ibid., 29. 16. Because the early evangelization of the Americas and the European Reformation were coeval, the Catholic world wrestled with the proper role of images in communicating the faith both across linguistic boundaries and in the face of Protestant charges of idolatry. The Council of Trent articulated the official Church position after nearly a century of upheaval. J. Waterworth, ed., “Session the Twenty-Fifth,” in Cannons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London: Dolman, 1848), cccxxxvi–ccliii. 17. Advertencias, 36. 18. Ibid., 38. 19. On mestizos in the eighteenth century, see Magali M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 32–42. On the

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Afro-Mexican population of Valladolid, see Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 114–17. On the ethic composition of the larger Bajío region of Mexico, see John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), app. C. On mestizos in neighboring Guadalajara during the same period, see Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), chap. 2.

Chapter 16

Mendacious Texts

The Art of Confessional Dissimulation



Paul Ramírez

Those of us who study the past know to be suspicious of our sources and of the kinds of information they reveal.1 Taken too far, this observation becomes a mere truism: our sources are only ever partial perspectives on a much more complex reality. But the intellectual genealogy underlying this insight is in fact profound. It is one I see traces of in Inga Clendinnen’s book on Spanish colonialism in the Yucatan and the persecution of suspected Mayan idolators by the Franciscans in 1562. The stresses of colonialism, Clendinnen has shown, required the Maya to effect a stretching of old categories and concepts to accommodate, contain, and discern what was new and strange about the Spanish presence. So too, however, she found similar tendencies in her own scholarly work: like her Mayan interlocutors, she wrote, she too was in pursuit of patterns, trying to discern the behavior and understanding of both sides from the stripped-down, torn-from-theircontext glyphs and scripts remaining in the documentary record. It is a powerful model of historical study in which the goal, in her memorable words, is “to use the Maya method to discover Maya thought.” 2 The fancy term for this remarkable project is hermeneutics of suspicion, which French philosopher Paul Ricoeur defined as an act of interpretation that uncovers what is hidden in the text as well as in the reader—a turning of the analytical microscope back onto the researcher. The implications of Clendinnen’s insight—to see something of her fumbling and stumbling over

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the past in Mayan actors under colonialism, and theirs in hers—are relevant here: historians of the colonial past grapple seriously with texts, no matter how threadbare and fragmentary, but they must inevitably make an imaginative leap to the muddled meanings and short circuits of European colonialism in the New World that produced them. I recalled this insight when reading the Advertencias para los nuevos confesores, in whose pages this reflexivity and mutual apprehension and suspicion are everywhere. It is a supplemental confession manual written at the end of the eighteenth century to complement the guidebooks that were already available. Full of warnings about propriety in the confessional and advice on the art of eliciting a satisfactory statement of sins committed, its anonymous Carmelite author presented these and other hard-won lessons as a function of the typical confessions of a range of actors. Types were essential in part because the genre could countenance only so much messiness; schematic neatness, in the service of predictability, was the ultimate goal. The resulting work insisted on the priest’s power of volition even as it sought to deny it to the penitent. Following Clendinnen, in what ways do we as readers resemble the Carmelite author, foreclosing other realities in our work for the sake of the appearance of finality? This is the question that compels me to turn to different confessional contexts—in particular one, signaled only incidentally in the guide, in which colonial subjects made the sorts of accommodations in reaction to the exigencies of their circumstances that Clendinnen found in the Yucatan. The silences and omissions of one text send us in pursuit of other contexts that can help us place the Carmelite’s confessional instructions in a different light. Presumably disseminated and studied in Valladolid’s Carmelite college in the years after 1796, the Advertencias presented a highly skeptical view of Indian penitents, their motives, and their affinity for deception and concealment. The novice reader is repeatedly reminded that there was no such thing as a standard confession: different types, or calidades, of penitents had different sins to confess and comported themselves in particular ways. Interrogatories had to be tailored to whether the penitent was a “coarse” indio (Indian), a boy, a prostitute, a lecher, or a thief. Verbal communication, the underlying premise of successful confession, was always potentially undermined by differences of class, culture, and age. Young men and women were considered to be easily distracted and to fail to pay careful attention to the

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line of questioning, as were indios, the poor, and other unlearned classes, to whom questions had to be put patiently and in clear, simple terms, with wording varied to achieve understanding. Similarly, penitents’ occupations were seen to make them vulnerable to different kinds of temptation: deceiving an employer, cheating a customer, or offending the public at large. Above all, women and men were held to be categorically separate, not simply because women generally knew more Christian doctrine than men did, but also because of the sexual threat women supposedly represented within confessional time and space.3 Not all penitents were created equal; some were more worthy adversaries in the continuous struggle for salvation. Sinners were especially imagined to be susceptible to shame and fear and disposed to resist divulging their sins, or to reveal certain sins and impurities while concealing others. The confessor, if he was to emerge victorious from this battle, had to be on the lookout for tactical gambits in which revealing worked in tandem with concealing, prevarication, and obfuscation. The Advertencias enjoins him to be “like a rock”: emoting as little as possible, concealing reactions (even going so far as to cover his face with a handkerchief), and representing to the penitent that he has seen far worse sinning even when told shocking things.4 When words failed, euphemisms were recommended—perhaps a female penitent reticent to give voice to her sexual transgressions had been kissed “in the most secret part of her body”? 5 An anecdote is related in which a single woman, arriving to confess impure thoughts, admitted to lying about her virginity in a prior confession because she was ashamed at having been asked in more direct terms by the priest.6 Parishioners in this confessional world were always prone to deceive, but the confessor would prevail in the providential struggle over souls by doing the same, in a never-ending performance of dissimulation. These typologies compose a map much simplified from the territory the manual was meant to describe. With sections split by class, occupation, and sex, the very structure of the Advertencias is the product of an encyclopedic age obsessed with classification—an age in which Linnaean taxonomies placed the natural world into neat boxes of genera and species removed from their geographic settings. As the Advertencias created a confessional map, distilling patterns from experience that would provide guidance for future action, it too stripped the colonial society it described of crucial features. Consider the author’s rendering of women: even a casual reader would

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understand that they were the most dangerous kind of penitent. In typical cases in which sinners did not understand, had not reflected sufficiently upon doctrine or the nature and number of sins, or were ashamed, it was usually thought that the confessor’s aggressive, willful persistence would compel these penitents to divulge their sins.7 The exception comes in the crucial fourteenth section, “Solicitation in the Confessional,” in which the power hierarchy is inverted by means of women’s subversive sexuality. Here the reader was warned to guard against the ruses of women who, surely diabolically inspired, saw confession as a pretext for other purposes. The author recounted in considerable detail the experience of another Carmelite who was approached in the confessional by three women seeking to capture his attention and affection. One, concealing her true intentions, went further than the others to catch the unsuspecting friar, feigning illness so that he would come to her home to hear her confession. On another occasion this woman called him to hear the confession of a sick member of her household, only to intercept him afterward for beverages and conversation and, the reader is led to believe, something more.8 The friar lost this match; he was finally forced to transfer to another friary. The failure of confession in this case derived not primarily from fear or misunderstanding but rather from a clear intent to deceive. The women involved displayed active volition and are characterized as having had excessive will, which contradicts the author’s prior characterization of women as sexually passive or less often aggressive than men.9 In the manual this assertion of hypersexuality stands out as the only one in which a priest loses the confessional struggle. On the whole, women are portrayed as sexual agents and objects—sexual deviants, temptresses, and prostitutes—but not, notably, as mothers or producers in any other sense. The author resisted considering women’s work or women in their identities as laborers; the only reference to penitents as parents—surely an important component of their identity—highlights their responsibility for ensuring their children’s Christian indoctrination and their tendency to drink to intoxication, fight with their spouses, or swear in front of the children.10 What to make of what amounts to a glaring omission in the confessional map drawn for the novice confessor? Surely it derived from the construction of the Catholic sacrament of Penitence, a ritual in which the deviance that requires correction is frequently sexual in nature. Presumably too the author

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focused on what was salient to him—namely, women’s sexuality as an omnipresent threat to confessional success. In the priest’s elicitation of reports of impure thoughts and actions, therefore, it can reasonably be expected that confessional discourse would tend to occlude other realms of experience. But which ones? In what other moments or settings were women so full of volition, able to control interactions with their male confessors, in contrast to the text’s frequent characterization of them and the lower classes as innocents of limited intellectual capacity, to be controlled and subdued?11 We are left imagining other kinds of action beyond the confessional, where competing spheres of authority allowed women to shape the exchange. The Advertencias helpfully provides the critical lead: much confessing in Mexico, in fact, did take place outside parish churches, especially in moments of crisis, such as when a priest was called to the bedside of a gravely ill parishioner to administer the last rites and ensure the salvation of his or her soul should death occur.12 In fact at the very moment the confession manual was composed an outbreak of smallpox made inroads from Guatemala and Chiapas. Bourbon administrators put into action a plan to quarantine infected regions, which brought commerce to a standstill in much of Oaxaca and mandated the isolation of sick children in makeshift infirmaries, often away from their parents and other loved ones. As tensions over these emergency measures mounted, the priests in charge of the parishes in the capital began reporting evasions of mandatory inspections, which amounted to a less violent, less vocal, less discernible form of noncompliance. The priest in charge of the barrio of Xochimilco, during routine inspections of his parishioners’ homes, found the majority of the children hidden, the parents “rolling them up in a straw mat and placing the mat in a corner, or lifting them onto the roof, . . . or placing them in crates while the inspection was carried out.” 13 According to copious documentation, parents were neglecting to call priests to hear confessions or were delaying the last rites, all in the belief that once a priest entered their home, he would denounce the sick children to the authorities. A vivid report submitted by Friar Pedro Joseph Frasqueri recalled how, in one of the city’s outlying barrios, he had encountered a bedridden girl of thirteen or fourteen, her face and body disfigured by smallpox, and reprimanded both parents for not calling him to hear her confession. According to him, the mother related in detail her efforts to manage her daughter’s illness: she had

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traveled covertly to one of the city’s pharmacies in pursuit of a remedy, placing a towel around her neck to conceal her identity (calling to mind the practice of the priests who concealed their reactions during confession by covering their faces with a handkerchief), and administered the medication she obtained upon returning. Apparently appreciating the urgency of her situation, the friar agreed to send one of his assistants to hear the girl’s confession furtively, after evening prayers, at which hour no one would see the confessor coming or going. Parents nearly crippled with fear nevertheless managed to close off their domestic spaces to keep safe the secrets they harbored inside. In this variation of confessional practice, the laity called the shots. Women specifically can be glimpsed as mothers struggling to keep out the prying eyes of the Church and the Bourbon state, precisely by refusing priests the exercise of their confessional duties. The patterns of evasion, imperceptible to the author of the manual or irrelevant to his purposes, point up the limitations of confessional guides as evidence, even as we recall their notable usefulness. Sets of manuals for parish priests, when used alongside other sources, have yielded rich reconstructions of the colonial elite’s intellectual assessments of indios, which stressed a view of parishioners as perpetually emotional, irrational, deceitful, fearful, wretched, or innocent, in need of special guidance, protection, and supervision.14 If such patterns of thought can be discerned from the genre, perhaps it can reveal more about the dynamics of priest-parishioner interactions or the dynamics of parishioners’ domestic lives. The latter aspects are present in the Carmelite manual, but only obliquely: the goal, after all, was to simplify and isolate dynamic actors and their motives, the result of a moral certainty about the righteousness and correctness of a spiritual cause that had to limit doubt to succeed. It was, one could say, a product of faith. Even those of us without faith claims of our own are susceptible to believe that we know more than we do and that we see more than we can. Guarding against the arrogance of this position should not cause us to lose hope in the value of a complicated source such as the Advertencias. It is a record of the effectiveness of the Carmelite order’s sacramental practice, which of necessity required simplification to be so effective. The business of salvation was a tricky matter, after all, as our Carmelite author knew, and the stakes of “revealing a conscience” through skillful questioning, careful rewording, and tireless persuasion were high.15 Once we see the dissimulation on both

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sides, however, the exchange looks more like a dance of revealing and concealing, a necessarily imperfect confession ultimately achieved by mutual deceit. As with sacramental fees and the use of rural churches, the right to negotiate ritual practice was just as often claimed by parishioners as it was strategically bestowed by priests. Laypeople were capable dissimulators, when they had to be, and in intense moments fraught with emotion they sought and managed to control the secrets of the community. Taken as a point of departure rather than an end, the manual discloses a universe of tantalizing possibilities. What other secrets did a Carmelite’s line of questioning fail to reveal? What sacramental stories remain to be told?

Notes 1. Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 350–79. This work traces the power struggles and ruses that lie behind many of the certified documents produced in the colonial period—whose reliability we still occasionally for granted. 2. Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517– 1570, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 136. 3. Advertencias para los nuevos confesores, Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de San Alberto de los Carmelitas Descalzos, Carpeta 1669, 9. 4. Ibid., 4–6, 79–80. 5. Ibid., 26–27. 6. Ibid., 35–36. 7. Ibid., 59–60. 8. Ibid., 51–52. 9. Ibid., 36. 10. Ibid., 9–10, 24–25. The confessor was warned that he should demonstrate forbearance toward women but not encouragement, bring them to God but not attract them to himself, and mix sweetness with seriousness and circumspection for this purpose, as if the situation might devolve into sexual depravity at any moment (7). 11. A woman who approached a confessor claiming to have been solicited in the confessional was to be doubted and told to return fifteen days later, in which time her story might change. (Presumably, it would be concluded that she herself was the aggressor.) 12. Yet the author warned that even this situation might often be an occasion of deceit as well by inveterate sinners (i.e., people who intend to continue committing a certain sin) who could not obtain absolution any other way. Advertencias, 74–75.

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13. Archivo General de la Nación, Epidemias, vol. 10, exp. 3, Antequera, February 4, 1797. 14. William B. Taylor, “‘ . . . de corazón pequeño y ánimo apodaco’: Conceptos de los curas párrocos sobre los indios en la Nueva España del siglo XVIII,” Relaciones 39 (Summer 1989): 5–67; William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 173–77. 15. Advertencias, 34.

Chapter 17

Advice and Warnings for New Confessors by a Discalced Carmelite Friar and Priest Translated by Karen Melvin, Paul Ramírez, and Sylvia Sellers-García



For the use of Father Friar José de los Angeles In this Holy College of Moral Theology of the Discalced Carmelites in [the city of] Valladolid. July 4, 1796 Jesus, Mary, Joseph

Advice and Warnings for New Confessors Number 1 I do not plan to offer here all the warnings and advice that would be useful to new confessors, only to give them some practical counsel about the prudent manner in which they should behave in the confessional with the different types of penitents who come to them. [It is] not even all of such counsel that I could offer, but only some that is not usually found in books and that relates more to the confessor’s judgment than the formal rules of confession.

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Section 1. Practice Exercises Number 2 First, one or more fellow students or confessors should do exercises to practice moral theology, especially the following counsels, with one taking the role of penitent and the other of the confessor. The penitent could style himself an Indian, a rudo [coarse person], a boy, a merchant, a prostitute, a lascivious person, a thief, and so on, in each case making up some sins. The confessor should fulfill his role punctually as though he were hearing it in the confessional. At times he should demonstrate affability and others reprehension, sometimes exhorting, sometimes absolving, and sometimes deferring absolution, and so on. And through this method he will improve greatly, review in brief all moral theology, and become accustomed to that which might be offered in the confessional. When he comes to the confessional, nothing will be new, as happened with me. If doing this exercise with an experienced confessor, he could correct the other when he errs or advise him about that which he should ask.

Section 2. Some General Advice Number 3 When the confessor goes to hear a confession, he commends himself to San Juan Nepomuceno, grand advocate for confessors and penitents, to the Most Holy Virgin Our Lady, to his guardian angel, and he asks His Majesty for light and grace so that the blood of Christ wins souls. He should do the same in all difficulties that he encounters, raising his heart to God.

Number 4 He seeks nothing else in each confession other than to win that soul, through which he will also advance toward his own salvation.

Number 5 For this he should proceed very slowly in everything. It is known that if he goes quickly, he will achieve nothing of benefit. In this there are certainly

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many moral failings, and the confessor’s haste seems to me one of the most frequent causes of not helping penitents. What business could be more important than winning souls for God?

Number 6 When hearing a confession, he should be like a rock, without showing horror or admiration or expressing anger, even if people confess enormous things.

Number 7 Regularly and especially during long confessions, inquire about the type, number, circumstances, and so on, of each thing that people confess. See number 73.

Number 8 He should consistently treat everyone with kindness, gentleness, patience, sweetness, and pleasantness; this will help his counsels and orders to be well received.

Number 9 He should especially be very affable with boys, with teenagers, with the ashamed, with those lacking hope for Divine Mercy, and with great sinners in order to bring them to God and to facilitate confession. Save me, God! How many sinners have there been who have gone years and years without confession because of confessors’ roughness, angry facial expressions, and rudeness?

Number 10 With women he should also be pleasant but not flattering, affable but not honeyed. He should attract them to God but not to himself; he should mix gentleness with gravity, sweetness with circumspection, and affability with respect.

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Number 11 The people with whom I wish you to be very severe are those doubters who are hardheaded and disobedient. Humble them, overcome them, and subject them to obedience, because otherwise they will never be cured.

Number 12 It is highly advised that the confessor does not involve himself in the affairs of his penitents, even if they have spoken of them in the confessional, especially regarding questions of matrimony, because it is improper and incompatible with this sacred ministry and because it exposes the confessor to a thousand nightmares. If he is a friar, he will have problems with his prelates, who justly prohibit it. And even if he is not a friar, if he opposes a marriage, he will have problems with those who desire it. And if he encourages the marriage, he will have problems with those who seek to impede it. And in case a matrimonial lawsuit is formed, the Father Confessor will be listed in its documents, with little honor to him or his order.

Section 3. Christian Doctrine Number 13 It is enough for absolution to know doctrine quoad substantiam [in its essence]. And even though some adolescent boys and coarse individuals do not know the Articles of Faith to the letter as in the catechism, this should not distress the confessor, who should continue questioning them like so: “Tell me, boy, who created everything? Who redeemed you?” But he should admonish them that so they learn it as it is in the catechism.

Number 14 For all penitents who are not known to the confessor, even if they are decent and of high social status, he should ask them their doctrine. But if he knows them and they are respectable and educated men who take care that their families know their doctrine, and so on, it will not be necessary

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to ask them. Women commonly know theirs better than men. If some of these people are surprised that you ask them their doctrine, you could tell them not to be surprised because it is the confessor’s obligation to ask everyone whom he does not know whether they know it or not, “And since I do not know your honor,” and so on. And even if being admonished in this way, the penitent does not want to answer whether he knows it, he comes indisposed for confession, for which he should be humble and obedient.

Number 15 Fathers and mothers of families should be asked if they take care that their children and family know their Christian doctrine. See number 31.

Section 4. Professions Number 16 When the confessor examines the sins of penitents, he should ask each one about anything and everything into which it is common to have fallen.

Number 17 With herdsmen, shepherds, servants, cooks, and servants, you should ask if they have taken anything belonging to their masters without their permission. They should not be asked if they have stolen anything, because the term stolen might shame them and dissuade them from confessing their sins. See number 77.

Number 18 With shoemakers, craftsmen such as tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, and so on, ask if they work precisely and well. [Do] they charge more than [is] fair for the work that they do, and so on? For these people do not consider whether their work is good or bad, and they charge the same for the bad as for the good.

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Number 19 With day laborers such as bricklayers, farmhands, harvesters, and other workers in the countryside, ask if they slack off. For they, if not compelled, spend the whole day in idleness and do not give it consideration.

Number 20 With the merchant, [ask] if he has made any illicit contracts. [Does] he earn as much as he can on what he sells? (By earning as much as they can, many of them or almost all of them are in error of what is licit.) [Ask] if he has sold as good anything corrupted, broken, rotten, and so on, [or] if he has sold anything inferior as superior, such as Bramante or Bretaña [two types of linen cloth], and so on. See number 84.

Section 5. On Obligations of Other Professions Number 21 The confessor should advise bishops, prelates, priests, birth fathers, and all those who because of their profession or position are obligated by piety or justice to provide good example to all of their faithful, children, and so on, that if they do the opposite, they commit yet another sin against piety and justice, and so on—for example, a priest who sins with one of his faithful, or a father who provokes one of his children to steal or who gets drunk and does something bad in front of them, by which he offers them a bad example.

Number 22 Also the confessor should advise those who are in a position to prevent robbery or other evils that if these robberies or evils are committed, they commit an additional sin against justice. For example, a governor, an alcalde mayor [district-level royal official], a guard, and so on—if these people steal, they commit yet another sin. Although the two pieces of advice offered in this paragraph pertain to the formal rules of confession, I wanted to give them because they are not usually covered in the Sumas Morales. See number 75.

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Section 6. On the Fifth Commandment Number 23 With the thief, smuggler, and so on, ask if his life is put at great risk, because in this there is yet another sin. See number 48.

Number 24 Also [ask] if he put himself at risk because he resolved to kill someone and [the person] resisted. See number 49.

Section 7. Boys Number 25 The confessor should be advised that boys’ confessions are done by rote: “I confess, Father, that I did not hear Mass; I confess, Father, that I fight; I confess, Father, that I said the bad word (hijo de puta [son of a bitch]), and so on.” And so it is necessary to deduce as you go what these are in order to examine the type, number, and so on, of sins.

Number 26 Their attention is distracted not only by the mind but also by the hands, feet, head, and all the body. The confessor should not be surprised that when the boy who is confessing hears some noise, he will turn to see what it is, or that at the same time he is confessing he is scraping the table with his finger, tapping his foot, playing with his hands, and so on. And it is necessary to suddenly call attention to what you are telling him, with these or similar words: “Pay attention here, boy. Pay attention to what I am telling you,” and so on.

Number 27 The confessor should take much care not to open [boys’] eyes [to new sins]. And so when examining them on the sixth commandment, it is enough to ask them if they have committed any picardias [lascivious or lustful acts]? If

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they made have any shameless remarks? If they have said the bad word? And according to how they respond, you could continue asking more, but in a way that they do not learn what they do not know.

Number 28 Also you should ask them if they have have they played during the Mass? If they pay attention to it? If they have disobeyed their parents? If they have fought with other boys? See all of the following section.

Section 8. Coarse and Ignorant People Number 29 This class of people comprises boys, Indians, many gente ruin [vile people], and other various types who are known to have little capacity, [possess a] crude intellect, and lack proper education.

Number 30 With all these you should ask about doctrine. See numbers 13 and 14.

Number 31 All the questions you ask these people, be they about doctrine or whatever other subject, should be made with clear, colloquial, and simple terms, and if they do not understand them in one form, change them to different forms and with different words so that they understand what you are asking them. In this there is certainly a great deal of sloppiness on the part of the confessor, so they respond yes or no without knowing to what they are responding or what the confessor asked. For example, on Christian doctrine: “Tell me, son, who is in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar?” If he does not understand you, you say, “When the Priest raises the Host or the Chalice after the consecration, who is in that Host?” And likewise: “When you arrive to take communion, whom are you receiving in that wafer? Or when the Parish Priest takes the viaticum to the sick, who is there in the consecrated wafer?”

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All this ends up being the same question modified into different forms so that if he does not understand through one form or some terms, he will understand through others. When coarse people do not respond well to the questions that I ask them about doctrine, I do not judge that they do not know it, but I change the question into various forms and with other terms, and I have found a thousand times that when they come to understand what is being asked, they respond with good answers and with intelligence— within their limited capacity. This I have seen, not one or another time, but very many times, and from this I have been persuaded that the majority of penitents whom confessors dismiss as ignorant of doctrine are really and truly not ignorant but do not understand the Father Confessor, and so they were not able to answer him. This is a very important piece of advice that all confessors should observe when they ask coarse people about doctrine as well as when they ask about anything else. Vary the question, asking in diverse forms and with different terms until they understand it, and you will see exactly what I am telling you. For this much patience and gentleness is required, treating them with sweetness and affability, taking each thing not hastily but very slowly and seeking only to win that soul for God.

Number 32 With coarse people, do not ask questions that have two or three parts, because either they do not respond or they respond only to the last part, if perhaps they understand it. Each question, then, should have only one part, and this [should be] very short so that they understand it. For example, you will not ask them, “Tell me, son, do you believe that your children know their Christian doctrine? Have you taught them? Does your wife review it with them? Or do they go to school to learn it?” To this he will not respond, or he will respond: “No, Padre.” And with this “No, Padre” he wants to say that his sons do not go to school, which was the last part of my question. With him, then, you should ask in this manner: “Tell me, do your children know their Christian doctrine?” And if he tells me no, I will ask him, “Then why do they not know it?” To this he will say that it is because they are young or for some other reason. But always with coarse people it is necessary to proceed asking part by part, bit by bit.

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Number 33 Boys and coarse people regularly do not specify the number of their sins and so it is necessary to ask them.

Number 34 And when [you have] asked and they respond, do not give much credence to the number that they give, sometimes because they do not understand the question and sometimes because they did not determine the number because they do not know better. It is necessary then to examine the numbers that they confess with much patience and gentleness, and afterward, when they say that they have nothing else to confess, to examine commandment by commandment and obligation by obligation, paying attention to their estado [marital or religious status, such as married, widowed, or priest] and oficio [occupation or position]. And the confessor can take more from this examination than from the one that these people make by themselves.

Number 35 Nor should much be made of the yes’s and no’s of coarse people, for the stated reason that they regularly do not understand what is being asked. An Indian confesses, for example, that he did not hear Mass on Sunday. If the confessor asked him, “And what cause, reason, or motive did you have for this?”, the Indian certainly will respond, “No, Father,” but this “No, Father” is not responding to what you asked. What happened is that he did not understand the question, and that “No, Father” is a repetition of what he already confessed, which is “No, Father, I did not hear Mass,” which is what he understood. With him, then, instead of [asking] that question, the confessor should say, “And why did you not hear Mass, son?” To this he will respond, for instance, because he arrived late, or whatever it was.

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Section 9. Vile People Number 36 This class of people is understood to be peddlers, mulattoes, Africans, people with poor dispositions, millworkers, lazy people who were raised poorly, vagabonds, vagrants, and rogues.

Number 37 These types typically do not give due consideration to confession and relate it like a blind man’s story. Much caution is therefore necessary regarding their repentance and will to reform their ways and inciting them toward this. These people make me tremble because I mistrust much of their repentance and disposition. These people do not confess more than once a year even though many are miserable with fear that they will be put on the lists of people who are publicly excommunicated.

Number 38 With vile people (and also with Indians) it should be asked if they drink and if they get drunk. And if so, have they done so in front of their children, or have their children seen them drunk? And then there are additional sins, as number 21 says.

Number 39 If they fight with their wife? If they abuse her? And, if so, is it in front of their children? This also to Indians. See number 21.

Number 40 If they provide for them and give them what they need, or if they misspend what they earn? Also to Indians.

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Number 41 If they have said profanities, curses, oaths, or shameless words? And if they have done so in front of their children?

Number 42 Have they fought with others? Or have they wished someone evil? Or gossiped about others or damaged their reputations?

Section 10. Sixth Commandment Number 43 In examining the sins of the sixth commandment, the confessor should walk on eggs, which is very necessary so as not to put himself or the penitent in any danger.

Number 44 When speaking of the sixth commandment, use terms that are very pure, and when penitents cannot explain themselves, help them with very pure words. A woman who led a very virtuous life confessed to me a forgotten sin from her earlier life, but the poor woman choked on the words because she could not find the terms to explain herself. She said as follows: “Forgive me, Father, that when I was a young girl, a gentleman who was in my parents’ house grabbed me once and he kissed me in . . . he kissed me . . . instead of kissing me on my face he kissed me . . . he kissed me. . . .” Putting an end to her anguish, I said to her, “On the most private place of your body?” At which point she answered, “Yes, Father.” And I certainly do not exaggerate the delight and happiness with which the poor woman responded, having ended her distress and her sin entirely revealed. When it is necessary to indicate things such as these, you can use these terms: the most private place of the body (which is what I use most frequently because it seems to me the most pure), the natural vessel, the posterior vessel, the use of matrimony, natural copulation, natural access, to penetrate, penetration, natural seed, human seed, effusion, impure touches, and touches.

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Section 11. Examination of Men on the Sixth Commandment Number 45 With the man who confesses to having sinned with a woman, you should ask him if he solicited her. And does he regularly do so?

Number 46 And if you saw that he was very enamored of her, you could ask him also if he solicited her with many requests and begging? And if he used a third party.

Number 47 Many men make unfounded judgments of what one or another woman will consent to if he solicited her. And you should ask them about this. What is certain is that if they do not believe they have to conquer her, they will not solicit her.

Number 48 Also you have to ask a lascivious man (especially if he sinned with a married woman or with the daughter of friends) if he put himself at risk, because they might kill him.

Number 49 Also [ask] if he put himself at risk or if he was resolved to kill her husband, father, brother, and so on, in case they were discovered or caught en flagrante?

Number 50 These same two questions should be asked of honorable men. For example, [if] a gentleman copulated with the wife of one of his friends while he was in the city or in his own house, this surely puts him at risk of killing the husband or being killed by him—and therefore others.

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Number 51 Those who sin with prostitutes or with very corrupt women put themselves at risk of contracting grave illnesses and so you should also ask this of very lascivious men.

Number 52 With the very lewd and shameless, you can also ask if his sin was committed with impudence, shamelessness, and brazenness. And if it was in public or in front of many people? Because that particular shamelessness adds sins. Also if they have bragged, glamorized, and made a show of their sins. See number 59.

Number 53 With the man who says vulgar things, [ask] if the words are very impure and shameless. Vile men and other impious men say many such things. Many of these men frequently say lewd and provocative things to whatever women they encounter, even without any intent to sin with them, only to talk for the sake of talking and to sin for the sake of sinning—and all this publicly. You should ask them about this.

Section 12. Examination of Women on the Sixth Commandment Number 54 With women whose estado the confessor does not know and who confess an impure sin, be it in thought or in deed, you should not ask them, “What is your estado?” For if she is not a doncella [an unmarried woman who is still a virgin], she will be too ashamed to say so, and with this question the confessor exposes her to not telling the truth about a grave matter. Understand well what I say. All the moral theologians teach that the confessor should in such cases examine the estado of the penitent in order to know whether the sin was estupro [illicit sex with a virgin]; adultery, if she was married; or simple fornication, if she was a corrupt woman. I too agree with all this, but what I am saying is that you do not ask in these terms: “What is your estado?” The reason is that with this manner of asking the woman who is not a

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doncella or married is put at risk of not telling the truth. In Spain she could easily respond that she is a soltera [an unmarried woman who is not a virgin], because there this term has the wider meaning of a woman who has not yet taken on an estado, be it a doncella or not a doncella, but in this realm it specifically means a corrupted woman who has not taken an estado and so women are shamed by this term. In order to remove the sins, I ask other questions that do not shame her. The first is “Are you married?” If she responds no, I have already determined that there was no sin of adultery. The second is “Have you made a vow of chastity?” If she tells me no, then I have deduced that there was no sacrilege. And none of this can shame her. To find out if she was or was not a doncella and to deduce if there was estupro, the process or dialogue of the confession almost always reveals the answer, so that without asking or shaming the women, they themselves declare it with the other sins that they confess. And if in the few instances that the answer is not identified in the dialogue of the confession, then at the end of it you can ask with kindness and affability, “Señora, assuming that you have disclosed your conscience and have declared your sins to me, of course you will not be embarrassed to respond to what I am going to ask you, which is necessary to determine the sins that were in the unreasoned thought that you confessed at the beginning. Tell me, before this thought, had you sinned in deed against the sixth commandment of the Law of God?” Here you should not use the term doncella, because saying it shames women who are not doncellas, nor that of soltera, because it causes those who are to blush; but ask them if they have sinned in deed—that is, by consummated copulation. This is what I have done various times, and they have always confessed fully and without shame that yes, they have done this. Finally, to confirm all the aforementioned, I want to relate what has happened to myself on one occasion. A woman arrived to confess with me and confessed an impure unreasoned thought with a single man. I then asked her my two questions: “Are you married?” “No, Father,” she responded. “Have you made a vow of chastity?” “No, Father.” Immediately I said to her, “What else?” She paused for a moment and then continued, “Forgive me, Father, in my last confession I lied gravely to the Father, because I told him that I was a doncella even though I was not.” To this I replied, “Señora, then how come you hid this from that Father but candidly told me, who did not ask?” To this she responded, “Father, for this very reason, because the Father asked me and this shamed me, so I did not

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tell him. You did not ask and shame me.” I share this case to the letter, and since then I have confirmed in additional cases never to ask them what estado are you but to ask them the other two questions, if she is married and if she has taken a vow of chastity.

Number 55 It is not necessary to ask women if they have solicited anyone, because they very rarely solicit anyone with explicit words. But to some who have been very enamored of some man, you could ask if they have tempted [him]. For example, a rich and unencumbered widow might have directed her thoughts at someone she sees often, and with her actions, movements, manner, and facial expressions might have caused him to lean toward her, attracting his attentions so that he would declare his interest.

Number 56 Also, with women who confess sins in deed, you should ask them, if it was natural copulation? If they took precautions so as not to conceive? Or to abort? For example, if a daughter from a strict family was under the protection of her parents or brothers and she copulated with a single man, it would not take much for her to have fallen into these sins in order to avoid dishonor.

Number 57 What was said in the two preceding numbers you should also ask women of ill repute.

Number 58 Some women (and even some men) who have sinned in unnatural positions and ways want to explain if it was in this way or that way or another way. This you should not permit so as not to expose to risk the confessor and penitent. It is enough to know that it was in a way against nature. The most that you should ask is if there was risk of ejaculation extra vas femineum [outside the female vessel].

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Number 59 With the prostitute who goes out to solicit as many men as she encounters, it is impossible to determine the number of sins that she committed in each outing. But to form a prudent judgment, you should examine the frequency of her outings—if it was in a large city, such as in Mexico, or if it was in some small town. See if it was normal for her to meet any churchmen, fathers, married men, single men, and so on, and if there were many or few. This should also be determined about the very lascivious man who wants as many women as he sees. You should believe that these men, although they do not say so, are in continuous desire of whatever comes into their imagination.

Section 13. Married People Number 60 Some married people (especially women) insist that the confessor give them practical rules and individual suggestions relating to marital relations. Here the confessor should be fully advised so that he can promptly impede, reject, and cast away any treatment of it. First, because if he does not do so, he exposes himself to a manifest danger: What will it do to him to discuss such matters so specifically with a woman? What things will stay in his imagination, even for days afterward, what harm? Second, because this exposes her to the same risk. And third, because it is not necessary or proper to discuss such things. Fourth, because the confessor risks drawing the attention of the Inquisition if she foolishly or maliciously discusses the matter with another confessor. She might describe to him what was discussed in the confessional, and that confessor will realize that the advice was dishonest or not necessary and send the matter to the Holy Office. Fifth, because these questions are sometimes aimed at nothing other than provoking the confessor. See number 69. Realize, therefore, how important it is to avoid such discussions. If by some chance, out of ignorance and with pure intentions, a woman were to ask such a question about touching (which is what they most often wonder about), it is enough to say that such contact isn’t necessary because the beasts have natural intercourse without such touching.

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Number 61 With married people who are jealous, the confessor should be very strict, because these people are almost continually sinning with the reckless judgments they make about their spouse and about others. More often than not there is no solid basis for the jealousy. This is a very common trap used by the Devil to ruin marriages and to create for married people a living hell on earth as well as one beyond the grave. In such matters they should believe no one who speaks ill of their spouse. It chills matrimonial love and can even destroy it entirely. It harms the spouse with all those suspicions and reckless judgments. It mortifies and dishonors her, and it even dishonors the jealous man himself if it becomes known that he is jealous. It causes anger, arguments, fighting, and dishonor. It gives the spouse a reason not to love him and even a reason to be unfaithful out of vengeance for unjust jealousy. All of this the confessor should make evident to the jealous person, who should be treated severely until the jealousy ceases.

Number 62 If by some chance a person has caught his spouse in the act, the confessor should point out to him—kindly and gently—how pleasing it is to God that we should pardon those who have offended us, how his Divine Majesty is pardoning us for so much more, and how, by putting a hand on his heart, he might consider how much God is suffering for us, and so on. He should be mindful of what we ask of Our Father: that He forgive us, just as we forgive others; and therefore those who wish to be forgiven should themselves be capable of forgiveness; that we should be measured by the same yardstick by which we measure; that he has offended God much more than his spouse has offended him, and so on. All of this [should be done] with kindness, aiming to console him and to lead him effectively toward forgiveness.

Number 63 There are other jealous people who are of a bad and suspicious nature, and curing them is difficult. These tend to be men who are recently married, and such a man arrives at the confessional in a great state of anxiety, confessing

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among other things that he has discovered that his wife is not a virgin. I wish to speak here at some length on this matter, describing the means I have used and the methods God Our Father has made efficacious to cure those who have come to me with this ailment.

Number 64 The first thing I say is that it is extremely easy to be deceived in this matter because of the ardor of lust, which, instead of leaving one’s reason free to judge with prudence, muddles one’s mind and prevents it from focusing on anything other than sexual pleasure—or at least it is likely to be a distraction.

Number 65 But some will insist that they did not detect the definite signs of virginity (which is discussed in canon law under probationibus and is not necessary to discuss here). I then say to them, as a second point, that it isn’t possible for all women to be equally closed, because just as some women have large mouths and others have small mouths, some women have large noses or ears or eyes while others are the opposite, and all in the most natural way, so it is that some are very closed and others very open in the most private part of their bodies. I prove this by telling them that some marriages are annulled because the woman is so entirely closed that her husband cannot even penetrate her. I also confirm it by pointing out that some have great facility in giving birth while others have such difficulty that they die in the attempt. See El ente dilucidado, page 120, or [illegible].1

Number 66 Third, I prove the point by saying to them that many women lose their virginity without copulation, be it in a faltering step taken when they are children, a twisted foot, especially if it happens with those little sticks children play with, or a jump, a fall, an ill-taken turn, or a run. In all these situations it is possible for a girl to open herself and lose her virginity without any moral fault of her own. Some girls, in this way, can even break [the hymen].

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And so if men do find their wives without their virginity intact, they cannot necessarily infer that it is due to fornication.

Number 67 If for some reason this is not enough, it is useful to return to the point mentioned in number 62. But never should the confessor concede that she is not a virgin, but [only] persist with the other explanations, and so on.

Section 14. Solicitation in the Confessional Number 68 The confessor should be aware of the danger he is in from some women who, because they can accomplish it in no other way, arrive at the confessional provoked by the devil to solicit the confessor himself. For they come under the pretext of confessing their sins. I knew a member of my order who was solicited by three women who used this pretext. One of them belabored the point, saying she had a great escrupulo [doubt, or uneasiness of conscience]. And after the confessor had urged her to declare it, negotiating with her coy responses that she was too greatly embarrassed, she finally said that her escrupulo was that she greatly loved the confessor himself. Another, in the middle of other sins, confessed that she had had impure thoughts about the confessor. Another confessed that she “had felt tempted by him many times.” When something like this occurs in the midst of confessing sins, the confessor should push them away with a grave and serious tone. Do not be credulous and incautious; do not believe them, however much they say (once their malice is uncovered) that they are doing nothing more than confessing their sins sincerely. Do not believe it. If they really wanted to confess such a thing, they would go to see a different confessor. This is only common sense, and these women would easily recognize it, however stupid they might be. They go to the same confessor they are soliciting because they do not go to confess but to provoke. At the very least, it is suspicious behavior. Send them away promptly without absolution. And if they say they repent it and have done nothing but confess their sins, tell

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them to go to another confessor and to never return to confess with him. In conclusion, in such cases one should never believe a woman, however much she stresses her sincerity. One of the three that I mentioned made a thousand protests once her malice was uncovered, saying that she had only gone to the confessional to confess her sins and escrupulos, but the truth is that she afterward made so many efforts to ambush the purity of the confessor, even pretending that she was sick in bed and calling for him to hear her confession. He did not go. Since this did not work, she sent for him to hear the confession of a man who was sick in her house, she prepared refreshments and gifts for him to enjoy afterward, and she put herself before him with no embarrassment at all. He did not take any refreshment, but as soon as he had finished hearing the man’s confession (which he could not avoid doing, as he was ordered to go by his prelate), he left the house and not long after moved to a different friary.

Number 69 When a woman arrives saying that a confessor has solicited her, or something similar, do not believe her too readily. Consider that women might long to be solicited, and the more stupid a woman, the more malicious she will be; she will suspect ill will where there is nothing to suspect. When women arrive with something of this nature, look into the cause of the matter and all its circumstances carefully, and tell her to return in two weeks’ time. During this interval there will be time to study the case, think it over, consult with God, and so on. When she returns after two weeks, the confessor should expertly repeat the case to her, varying the circumstances here and there, removing and adding pieces surreptitiously; and if he sees that she contradicts in any way what she said the first time, send her on her way and consider the whole thing to be a lie—unless she says to the confessor on the second visit, before being caught in a lie, “Father, the last time I was here I said this or that, but I have reconsidered and I have remembered that it was not this way or that way.” And in this case send her away for another week or ten days to consider the case and see if then she has changed her mind.

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Number 70 When a woman arrives who has a real case in which she has been solicited by a confessor, and when, after going through the precautions stated above, the confessor determines that the case is one that should be denounced, he should order the penitent to do so. But if she cannot denounce it because she is, for example, from a conservative family [in which denouncing would damage her reputation], or because there is no Holy Office in the village, the confessor should tell her to denounce it in writing. But if she cannot do this because she is illiterate, the confessor should be warned not to ask the penitent for the name of this soliciting confessor in order to denounce him himself. First, this does not observe the four related Papal Bulls of Pope Benedict XIV. Second, the confessor who reports the solicitor in her name would expose himself to the risk that, if questioned by the Inquisition later about the events, she would deny them out of fear or embarrassment. In that case the reporting confessor would seem guilty of making false accusations. What I would say to such a woman, after determining her obligations, is this: “Would you like me to write to the Holy Office, telling them that they should send a representative because you want to open an Inquisition case with him?” If she says no, I cannot absolve her, because she is avoiding the denunciation. If she says yes, then I write to the Holy Office, and they settle matters there. And I have avoided the risk of being charged with making false accusations.

Section 15. Shameful Sinners Number 71 When a penitent arrives at the confessional who has remained silent about a sin in previous confessions out of shame, the confessor should urge him kindly and gently to put it forward. The following reasons will suffice: First, he will see that if he does confess, he will confess in the future with so much facility, such a sense of consolation in his soul, such a sense of pleasure and joy. Second, confessors have heard everything there is to hear. For in the confessional we hear nothing but missteps, miseries, and misdeeds and because we have learned how many kinds of sins sinners are capable of, and we understand that just as the thornbush cannot yield anything but thorns,

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so it is natural that human beings, as sinners, yield nothing but sins and misdeeds. This is the very reason that we place ourselves in the confessional in the first place, and so on. Third, the greater his sin, the greater glory I will have before God if I succeed in converting such a great sinner. The more rebellious, the more fortified the castle, the greater the glory for the captain who vanquishes it. The more lost the lamb, the greater the shepherd’s pleasure in finding it, and so on. Fourth, we confessors consider that however great the sins, they are nothing compared with the mercy of God; all is nothing to the blood of Jesus Christ. And so therefore, my son, do not fear: tell me your sin, that sin that you have been keeping secret, that sin that causes you so much shame. Give glory to God, who is longing to pardon you; he is waiting with arms open to receive you in them. Overcome it, my son; put this sin forward, and you will see afterward how gratified you will be, and so on. I have had the experience with several sinners that once the sin they had kept secret in other confessions is confessed, from then on they confess themselves with great joy and facility.

Number 72 Although the confessor may observe that the penitent does not come to the confessional with true repentance, and though the penitent may explicitly say as much, the confessor should exhort him to confess this sin that is causing him shame. I have done this with several people who came to me saying directly that they were not repentant and that they were coming to confess not out of sincerity but cynically, to save face. I asked them quite affably, “Well, my son, why is it you do not wish to confess? Isn’t it good to be in God’s grace?” “Yes, Father, but I am too ashamed to confess a great sin that I committed.” Then I persuaded them with the reasons listed above and with others that God gave me, and I urged them to tell me the sin with as much gentleness and sweetness as I could. “I know, my son, that you are not disposed to confess at this time, so I realize that you are not ready for absolution at this moment, but I implore you to tell me this sin that you have kept silent about in past confessions, this sin that causes you so much shame, because I trust in God, that if you bring yourself to tell it to me and overcome this principal difficulty, from then on your confession will be very easy. God will give you the grace to feel sorrow for everything, and you will find yourself

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coming to me to confess all of it.” Indeed I can confirm and I do confirm that in all truthfulness it has happened to me in just this way. Some have gone less than a week before returning. And as God is my witness, the poor souls [pobrecitos] have made their confessions with such happiness, with such a sense of relief, with such tears. That sin no longer caused them shame, nor did any other.

Number 73 When one of these penitents confesses the sin that caused him shame, the confessor should speak in a way that minimizes it, saying, “And this is what caused you such shame, my son? Well then—what else?” Do not ask at that point about the number of occurrences or the circumstances or anything; that will be done later, when the confession is over. And at the end (or sooner, if the subject comes up again), say something along these lines: “Well, my son, all your confession, all of your sins are nothing for Divine Mercy. Nothing that you have told me strikes me as new, and none of it shocks me; even that sin that caused you so much shame, that very same sin, even if you committed it millions upon millions of times, does not shock me, even if you committed it for one hundred years. And now that I’ve spoken of years, tell me: I suppose you’ve been committing this sin for all of your life, which would be (for example) fifty years. Is that right, my son?” And so on. . . . At this point one enters a discussion of the whole matter.

Number 74 To discover the number of sins committed by penitents who are ashamed (and the same goes for inveterate sinners), the confessor should exaggerate. For example, if a forty-year-old man arrives and is asked how long it has been since his last confession, and he responds that it has been a long time because he has been involved in an illicit friendship, the confessor should say the following: “Well, my son, I suppose it has been some thirty years that you have been in this bad state, isn’t that true?” “No, Father, it has been some twelve years.” (He will surely say this without remembering precisely, because if he sees that the number I have cast out is so large, what shame will it cause him to confess a smaller number?) I go on then, saying, “I suppose, too, that in

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those twelve years you would have sinned at least twelve or fifteen times a day. Is that not right, my son?” (This would be impossible, but it opens the door for him to go on without embarrassment.) “No, Father, not every day; perhaps three or four times a week.” Then I would go on saying, “But in those three or four days a week you would sin some fifteen or twenty times a day, right, my son?” “No, Father; only once a day. And on very rare occasions twice.” And so on. All of this is done because when the confessor, without being shocked at all, casts out a very large number, the penitent’s heart opens without fear and he has the courage to state the actual, lower number. In this same way I would examine all the rest of it—the kisses, hugs, gifts, love letters, visits, touches, and so on.

Number 75 In the confession of all people who are thus ashamed (and, indeed, all sinners generally) the confessor should suppose the worst and ask about it in this way. In the preceding example I would say, “I suppose also that you’ve had impure contact with this woman on many occasions with the most private part of her body, you’ve looked at her in a lustful way many times, and so on. I suppose as well that you have copulated many times in an unnatural way, and so on, including on some occasions from behind, and so on.” All of this should be done so that the penitent is not ashamed of confessing minor sins, since the confessor supposes other greater sins. But all of this in the previous two points should not be done with children or youth or other innocents, because this would effectively open their eyes and teach them to sin. See number 27.

Number 76 The confession of those who are ashamed of their sins (and of everyone) should proceed from lesser to greater sin, from least shaming to more shaming—or, in other words, from more universal to more specific. For example, a woman comes to the confessional and confesses in the following way: “Forgive me Father, for I have had bad thoughts.” Here the confessor would say, “Impure thoughts, is that right, my daughter?” “Yes, Father,” she responds. From this general point the confessor should move on to consider desires, then acts, then ordinary sins in general ways, then unnatural sins, and if she

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allows it this will proceed all the way to sodomy, to impure touching, to lustful looks, and so on, discussing in each case the number of occurrences, circumstances, and so on. This is not to contradict the previous point; rather I repeat that the confessor, in these cases, should always suggest the worst case, but proceeding from minor to major sins. For it is clearly proven that when I go immediately to the worst with a poor ashamed woman, she very naturally restrains herself, feeling ashamed, and curtails the confession.

Number 77 Let it be a general rule that the confessor proceed in this way with ashamed penitents so that their hearts should be opened, so that the shame that frightens them can be lifted: with much kindness, much gentleness, and always observing the proper solemnity, especially with women.

Number 78 Try also in the case of the ashamed to ask about sins in bite-size pieces, in small increments, so that the poor sinners have little to do other than say yes or no to everything, because this will cause them less shame.

Number 79 Also let everything that you ask (the same is true of inveterate sinners) be in a manner that supposes it to be true or takes it as a given, in some such terms: “I suppose you’ve also done this, haven’t you, my son? And of course you would also have done this other thing, right? Without a doubt you would also have done this, isn’t this so, my son?” For in this way they will be less ashamed.

Section 16. Inveterate Sinners Number 80 The confessor should ignore the inveterate sinner’s tendency to speak about hundreds of sins, examining instead the precise number by years, months, weeks, and days to determine the occurrence of the vice.

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Number 81 In the sin itself or the act of sinning that engenders a habit of vice there lies yet another sin, because the habit leaves the sinner in danger of constant backsliding. I raise this warning because although it pertains more to the formal rules of confession, the Sumas Morales generally does not discuss it. The habit sometimes forms on the eighth, seventh, sixth, fourth, third, second, or even the first time the sin is committed, depending on the passions, tendencies, appetites, and will of the sinner, and depending as well on the greater warning of [the sinner’s] perception [entendimiento].

Number 82 See also for inveterate sinners the points made in numbers 74, 75, 76, and 79.

Section 17. Sins and Cases with Grave Consequences Number 83 In all cases that can have grave or serious consequences and results, the confessor should proceed slowly and cautiously; he should not come to a decision quickly, even if it seems to him that he has studied the matter and is certain of his resolution. Ask for time—ten, twelve, fifteen days, or more, if necessary. After becoming well-informed in the case and all its circumstances, he should in those days meditate on the circumstances, commend himself greatly to God, and consult Him if it be necessary in the ways described in numbers 93, 94, and 95. Such cases are those pertaining to annulled marriage, divorce, annulled canonical elections, the buying and selling of benefices, all cases of annulment, the restitution of honor or of property, solicitation in the confessional, obligations to denounce others, invalid sacraments, and others along these lines.

Number 84 When people arrive in the confessional to confess regarding matters related to commerce and trade, the confessor should not assume immediately that the actions have been wrong. Instead, consult with men of the world: with moral authorities and jurists, with upstanding merchants, and with the confessing

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merchant himself. The resolution in such cases depends on observing and considering the case in all its particulars, and these particulars are usually things confessors are ignorant about and merchants are knowledgeable about. This has happened to me several times, that when someone confesses something to me of this kind I consider it to be wrong, and then after I listen to the penitent’s reasons and the specific circumstances, I come to the opposite conclusion.

Section 18. Repentance Number 85 The confessor is urgently advised to ensure that he is provoking true repentance and a genuine will to make amends in ordinary confessions of venial sins. I fear that some confessions made by generally virtuous people are done more out of habit than out of repentance.

Number 86 Be warned, as well, that some inveterate sinners who fear they will not be granted absolution ask to confess when they are sick in bed, so that with the supposed fear of death hanging over them they will be granted absolution more easily, even if they are not really at any risk.

Number 87 Pay little attention to the penitents’ tears, because in many cases people weep because they are not granted absolution. In other cases it is caused by the natural pain of seeing how depraved they are and how immersed in sin. In other cases it is a kind of fevered and desperate agony when they see that they cannot better their ways but are always breaking their vows. See number 37.

Section 19. Denying Absolution Number 88 I suppose some people reading this will be scandalized when I say that the confessor should never deny absolution. What I am saying is that the confessor should never deny it absolutely, but [only] defer it. In this way the inveterate

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sinner, the usurer who does not make compensation, the man in an illicit friendship who does not want to throw his lover out of the house, and all others should not be roundly and absolutely denied absolution but be told in essence the following: “My child, Divine Mercy is always here for you; the Holy Sacrament is for all sinners. If they want to do their part to receive the incomparable benefit of absolution for their sins, God will never hold back; His Majesty is inviting us, calling us to Him for forgiveness. He does the same for you, my son, and if on your side you are not ready, if you do not want to return to Him, if you will not cast this sin from your house, you alone are to blame for not receiving absolution. As long as you do not do everything that I tell you to do, you are not capable of absolution. But know that the doors of Divine Mercy are open to you; on any day that you like, when you repent of your sins, when you throw your lover out of your house, and so on, then come to me, my son. Come to confess, for if you come repentant you are sure to be absolved,” and so on. In this way use your words so that the sinner does not despair but instead goes away with the confidence that whenever he wishes, forgiveness can be had in the confessional. For inveterate sinners who are more correctable, delay absolution for two or three months to see if they start mending their ways, and so on.

Section 20. Sacramental Discretion Number 89 Some older people confess at the top of their lungs. With such people, the confessor should tell them to lower their voices.

Number 90 The confessor who hears the confessions of an entire family, such as a husband and wife or parents and children, should always be careful not to say anything or counsel anything that is not guided directly by what the penitent says—he should not be influenced by what others in the family have confessed.

Number 91 Some confessors are in the habit of holding a handkerchief in the hand and holding it over their faces when they are hearing confession, and this is a good practice. If they do not do so, they might reveal in their faces gravity or

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shock, and the penitent might infer by it that he has confessed to something very serious.

Number 92 The confessor is strictly warned not to speak ever, even in general terms, of what he has heard in the confessional. For he might say something today and then something else a year from now, and putting them together, the person hearing these things will clearly infer the sin and the sinner. Having recently arrived in this kingdom, I heard the following case. A deacon was the esteemed friend of a husband and wife, and he visited them often. He was ordained and received his license to hear the confessions of women. This woman who was his friend heard of it and went to confess to him. Having heard her confession, the cleric heard the confessions of other women. Then he went to the store of a friend who was a merchant, and he saw there the husband of the said young woman hanging out with a pack of lazy young men with poor judgment. They continued the conversation they were having about how women are so unfaithful. The good cleric proved himself more rash than all of them when he said that he had proof: “The infidelity of married women is so predictable that on this very afternoon I began hearing the confessions of women and, soon enough, the first woman who arrived was married and came to confess her adultery.” (Clearly this was already a breach of conduct, since the reckless priest was identifying the person by saying “the first woman.”) But let’s continue. Having concluded the conversation and gone to his house, the husband was received by his wife, who said, “Listen to the good fortune I had today. Today our friend so-and-so started hearing the confessions of women, and I was the first person whose confession he heard.” Hearing this and connecting it with what the priest had said, [the husband] was consumed with fury, and he took a sword and stabbed his wife in the chest. . . . [Pages in the original are missing here.] . . . discretion matters greatly. [The confessor] should also keep silent on all other circumstances that are not essential to reaching a resolution. For

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example, consider the case of a man who has been living out of wedlock for twenty years. Those twenty years should go unmentioned, saying instead that he has been living out of wedlock for a long time, because in this case that information is sufficient.

Number 95 But the wisest thing would be to make such consultations in a hypothetical and conditional way, saying to the person being consulted something like this: “I was imagining a case of this kind, and so on. If this were to happen, what should a confessor do?” And it is not necessary to say that it has actually happened.

Number 96 He who has read these pages and found benefit as a new confessor, I ask in return that he read a canticle from the Magnificat.2 The End

Notes 1. El ente dilucidado is a scholastic treatise on monsters and spirits by Antonio de Fuentelapeña, a Spanish Capuchin friar, first published in Madrid in 1676. 2. The Magnificat, or Canticle of Mary, is a collection of hymns or canticles taken from the Bible.

Afterword Kenneth Mills

Wellington Dawe was my father’s friend, a bachelor and already retired when I knew him during my childhood. Soft-spoken and not outwardly impressive, he had something inside. When Mr. Dawe talked, as my mother often remarked, everyone listened. His house was just the right sort of place. Painted green and white, it sat up high, overlooking the Red Deer River Valley. It was set way back in a big lot, amid massive birch trees and homemade bird feeders. A set of natural sculptures—some heavy and grounded, others reaching upward as if weightless—stood like sentinels all about. They were pieces of driftwood Mr. Dawe had collected along the banks of the river and then placed in the garden. I must have been inside the house dozens of times, but one visit stands out. It was cold, midwinter Alberta cold, and I remember approaching the house along a freshly shoveled walk, a corridor between twin piles of snow as tall as I was. Mr. Dawe’s living room was his study and workroom, and his study and workroom were his living room. His space fit him like an old shoe. It was bathed in warm sunlight, somehow fluid and brighter because of the crisp whiteness outside every window. There was driftwood in here, too: on the mantel, adorning a table, high on a shelf, guarding the vestibule, tucked into corners, blocking the way to the kitchen. The variety of sizes and shapes astounded, each one drawing the eye if only you’d let it. Stout and thick gave way to slim and ethereal. Branches

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Driftwood by Mr. Dawe. Photograph by author.

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jutted out this way and that, like gesturing arms and hands from a torso. Apart from the indoor pieces’ generally more modest sizes, only an occasional nod to functionality distinguished them from their outdoor colleagues. Nestled into the elbow crooks of a few pieces were small terra-cotta pots from which green leaves and vines cascaded freely. Wax had dripped and hardened down the arms of one or two others, now twisting candelabras. The room was also strewn with books. They seemed like the driftwood’s natural companions. Books were crammed onto shelves, heaped on chairs, and stacked on the coffee tables—at home on every available surface. One volume was open on a footstool between us. Mr. Dawe held his reading glasses in his hand as we talked that day, as if setting them down would break the connection with what he had been reading in the open book. We talked about history, although I don’t recall exactly what. What I remember was the way he spoke, the verve of his storytelling, and how it made me feel—the way people and ideas, settings and moments, through his words, became my people and ideas, settings and moments. Mr. Dawe, with his driftwood, had a way of proceeding that I have long savored, though only ever in the fragmentary, episodic way of memory, until now. This book by Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-García motivates a fuller account of myself in this regard. With its contributors’ chapters speaking ingeniously to various points along the process of historical research and writing, and with its encouragement for various kinds of precise imagining, cross-disciplinary thinking and methodological reflection, I suspect that it will stir related thoughts in other readers, teachers, and students. How is it that anyone becomes interested in—much less researches, teaches, and writes—the histories that each of us do? What sources call out, as if precisely to us, and why? What kinds of telling appeal? If we do turn to research, and begin to interpret and write, through which questions do we proceed? What are our modes and methods? How do they arise, incline, and develop as our sources change, as we take them for granted, as we encounter obstacles or apparent dead ends? Does one become a different investigator along the path of one’s researches? If so, why and how? And what, ultimately, about us? Is there, as Melvin and Sellers-García have suggested in the introduction, a defining relationship between our individual pasts and our historiographical predilections and methodological inclinations, our work of interpreting and writing?

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Historical research, the attachment of meaning to episodes and the braiding of them together, the discernment of patterns and exceptions, the acts of composition and revision—it’s all done by us. “History is nothing,” R. G. Collingwood wrote in 1946, “but the re-enactment of [the] past . . . in the historian’s mind.” 1 Half a century later Greg Dening pushed in a related way against any pretense that a textual past—“mostly part-participled, hindsighted, stilled, closed,” an “after-meditation,” as he described it—might be separated from the present life of the one who writes it. “To know the past as past is beyond our capacity,” Dening explained. “We only know a past through the histories made of it, by the past becoming in some way a text which we must read not just for the story it tells but also for the occasion of its telling and the mode of its expression.” 2 It should not be surprising that human memory works so similarly to history making, for, as Clifton Crais has insisted, the story of our lives doesn’t unfold as much as we unfold it. The human being is a ceaseless historical interpreter. We make histories as we make ourselves, knitting and unraveling, growing and then pruning, creating order and assigning significance, integrating certain experiences as key, but not others.3 Accordingly, we hone methods that reflect us and suit us and that meet our memory tasks at hand. Thinking over the ways in which my individual past may be inspiring my questions and shaping my historical interpretations, and deliberately reflecting on the geneaologies and methods of which I am aware—doing, in short, as Melvin and Sellers-García have urged—I land on nothing more truly than my memories of driftwood and Wellington Dawe. The certainty that my remembering self has embellished and invented some of what I am recounting, as I hope to make better sense of historical interpretation and myself, is part of the point. The driftwood gathering, like the pieces themselves, work for me. And they have shown a way. How many times was I brought along on the excursions my father made with Mr. Dawe? I remember what must have been a number of them as if they were one. My father and I would pick up Mr. Dawe in our station wagon well before dawn. We’d spurn any place too close to Red Deer (the city in Alberta after which the river is named) or any other community.4 Driving west and upriver, we left the parkland and entered the foothills, nearing the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, to some spot Mr. Dawe would

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indicate. There always seemed to be fresh cow pies wherever we parked the car and stepped out. These explorers’ escapes toward the mountains provided the same thrill I feel when, having avoided stepping in the requisite cow pies of routine life, I embark on research. Whether the destination is a manuscript archive abroad, the reading room in a rare-books library, or simply a day at home to read and think, the tingle is the same. Mr. Dawe was a quietly indisputable leader, the researcher and author of every expedition. My father and I were secondary, his assistants and occasionally his collaborators. I now believe that I was developing my own sensibility through learning Mr. Dawe’s way of proceeding—a method of noticing, choosing, and creating on which I have been improvising my entire life. How to describe his ways? Mr. Dawe led by doing and showing, through sharing experiences and stories. One needed to hang about and accumulate, watching, listening, and trailing along for a time. He was like the combination of a canny stream fisherman (who knows creeks and streams intimately) and an explorer, an abstract artist and a conjurer, a natural scientist and a geographer, with a bit of novelist and ethnographer thrown in. At many points in my reading of the cross-disciplinary impulses within this book, the contributors evoked Wellington Dawe and the driftwood. Training and temperament had led Mr. Dawe towards his “research field” of riverine environments and their debris. Knowing just where a promising array of driftwood was likely to wash ashore and gather required the application of ecological understanding and a degree of experience acquired over many years. What was known of this river and its gatherings of driftwood from years past? And what about the season in which we found ourselves? The snowfall and rate of runoff from last winter, the level and discharge of water, the speed of the current and the prevailing winds, prominent bends in the river, its alluvial plains, and the openings in the brush through we could clamber to the water’s edge were all vital bits of information in play. Tree growth along the banks, outcroppings, islands, and open stretches of beach were important, too. The river and its banks were research realms in which obstacles and disturbances were allies one needed to court. For it was against such aggregations of rock, building sediment, and decomposing driftwood that fresh pieces might collect. These microrealms were transitory, little driftwood worlds that would

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shelter birds, mammals, and plants, before the winds and waters that had made them began to unmake them again. Learning the river and its banks mattered, but finding the most promising driftwood also depended on dumb luck. Mr. Dawe was good at abandoning what made most sense, at erasing his ego and embracing serendipity. We would often return to bends in the river we had enjoyed before, for no apparent reason other than the fact that these were comforting places where we had once found great troves. These riverbanks were our field’s archives and libraries, not only storied and familiar to ourselves but also hallowed by generations of fellow seekers. Other times, guided by what seemed to be Mr. Dawe’s intuition alone, we combed entirely new stretches of river. These were the less frequented, often ill-organized repositories, to which even access itself often posed challenges. Acting on a whim, guided by chance in these unknown territories, we were as likely to find a stroll and a conversation as a discovery. The talent for noticing, the eye that enabled Mr. Dawe to see things in driftwood, nourished a remarkable patience and good humor in him, all resting upon his entirely liberating expectation of incompletion. His driftwood finds were not forced; the outcomes of our adventures were never insisted upon. One did not have to have expectations of a project, but only prepared to read and receive what came along. As the contributors to this book suggest so often and variously, silence and absence are evidence, too. As long as the river runs, driftwood would wash up on its banks. Our task was simply to remain sensitive, to slow down and keep looking (although we had to set off for home before sunset because my father didn’t like driving the forest roads after dark). If no promising driftwood turned up on a given excursion, it might be for the best, Mr. Dawe reminded us with a chuckle. His garden and house, and increasingly ours and those of his other friends, were already overfilled with his art. We were investigators open to discovery who didn’t need to find a thing. It only follows that I remember our rest breaks as fondly as any spotting of a piece or combing of a riverbank. Sitting on some rocks or on the driftwood itself, drinking coffee and cocoa out of plastic thermos lids, we passed around crushed peanut butter and jam sandwiches. These remembered moments and places fuse perfectly with others spent in the cafés and bars around the archives and libraries that enrich my life to this day—spaces in

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which a similar mix of refreshment and conversation among the like-minded offer time to take stock and to hear another’s joke or unexpected story. Did Mr. Dawe tell us during one such rest break on the riverbank about a Norse tradition that located the origin of humanity in driftwood? Or am I forming this idea from something I learned later? Three divine brothers, out walking on the beach one day, happened upon two pieces of wooden debris they so admired that from them the gods animated the first man and woman, Ask and Embla.5 How perfectly fascinating it seemed that humanity’s progenitors would have been driftwood from some remote northern shore. The driftwood came to us in rough clusters and deposits as well as alone. Its origins were usually unknown, and its forms were uneven in the extreme. There is an equivalence in a miscellaneously bound codex and many a manuscript bundle, or in a long neglected document or bit of correspondence. In all cases, there the thing sat, waiting to be considered, passed, or pored over. The piece of driftwood that Mr. Dawe would espy and fasten upon as special was defined by his interests, by his conceptions of what constituted curious beauty and expressive promise. Other pieces, while registered and perhaps even lingered over, were left behind on the shore. His way of proceeding now seems to me completely in keeping which how a researcher finds him- or herself drawn toward a particular primary source and past articulation while filing away seemingly numberless others as less significant, merely supportive or illustrative of a larger whole. “Historical research often unfolds surreptitiously,” Crais wrote. “You never know what you’re going to find when you open up an archival file or begin speaking with someone.”6 The historian’s professional image suggests something different: that we know exactly what we are doing as we labor to master a particular past. In fact, research is rather messier work, which is one reason we feel the need to have methodologies, a way to order the chaos, a way to organize our disquiet. Yet it’s in the unexpected things and the furtive glimpses into people’s entangled lives that we sometimes discover what is really important. We do our research, our noticing and choosing, in full knowledge that another eye and mind, a contemporary or a successor bearing a different individual past along that same stretch of archival riverbank or another, will notice and choose differently. Like a historical interpreter or any effective storyteller, Mr. Dawe seemed to be guided by what the driftwood was offering. He was allowing, in Melvin

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and Sellers-García words from the introduction, “the source to suggest its methods.” A piece stood out because of an inherent wondrousness, some essence or idea intimated by its place, colors, shape, and texture, perhaps even enhanced by the conditions of the day on which Mr. Dawe spotted it. The noticer, the finder, divines promise. But how does one become the driftwood’s teller, its begetter for others? How does one reveal the curious piece’s possibilities? Why position it one way and not another? And just where does one place it, here or over there? If, like a fragment of evidence, the piece of driftwood arouses feelings, evokes ideas or episodes, or explains something about certain people, how does the begetter coax these meanings, allowing his or her chosen piece to relate to other feelings ideas, episodes, and people? I remember a process akin to composition. This process connected how and where Mr. Dawe decided upon a piece with how and where he would have it come to rest. In the methodological terms explored by the contributors to this book, Mr. Dawe had learned to remain flexible, to remain an observer— not only adaptable in the kinds of learning and experience he might best bring to bear but also alert to when and how he ought to bring his piece to rest (i.e., to start writing). What expression was he after? What voice would he develop as most complementary to this object as the point of entry and to the setting in which he imagined its meaning would flourish? Some decisions seemed immediate, as if made right there on the riverbank. Given where and how he eventually placed the pieces he salvaged, I got the feeling that some driftwood cried out to rest in a certain way and in a certain kind of place almost as soon as he saw it, and that was that. With other pieces, the realization seemed slower. Beyond finding the pieces alluring and remarkable, in these cases it was as if Mr. Dawe was consciously proceeding with only an inkling of their significance. The mobile, floating natures of these pieces of evidence—their feelings, ideas, episodes, settings, and people—seemed to reassert themselves, begging different appreciations and mobilizations rather than assenting to some final order or condition of rest. These pieces of driftwood call to mind the range of sacred images and objects—used, altering, moving, changing—entangled with the kinds of meaning, people, and places that have captured the attention of William Taylor.7 The histories we gather and tell from our particular riverbanks of possible pasts are approximations or attempts, the best we can do. “History is

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memory’s impoverished replacement,” Crais contended.8 Whether a historical interpreter chooses to explore the process or not, he or she is the one who surveys and selects, disavows and drops, reexamines and decides. Although the notion of leaving something out, of forgetting in particular, can suggest neglect and even carelessness to a professional historical interpreter, it needn’t be so. “Forgetting is a necessary condition of being,” Crais wrote, and “so too are the facts we polish into metaphors and the stories we hone into history lessons, processes and results that shape how we live our lives.” 9 Between our visits to Mr. Dawe’s house, I remember noticing that our friend had moved some of his pieces of driftwood, adjusting their presentation as an author or editor might reposition an example or transform a line of inquiry in revision. The restlessness before his piece and its contexts seemed to have become second nature. Mr. Dawe understood some of his driftwood as unanswered questions. While continuing to notice and think about their possibilities, he recognized that it would be best to pass on his beauties—their questions and mysteries still reaching—to others. These bits of driftwood were but his twisting wooden versions of Taylor’s, Melvin’s and Sellers-García’s “loose threads . . . valuable in their own ways,” ultimately invitations to the reader to engage and interpret. Not being finished, thinking about methodology consistently alongside the work of interpreting and writing, and sending one’s best attempts to others became an expected and even the preferred outcome. Having been partly right about the pieces he’d placed along the way, moving them about and remaining open to their surprises anew, proved more satisfying, more human, than having pretended to be right.

Notes 1. R. G. Collingwood, “Epilegomena,” in The Idea of History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1946), 213–14, 228. 2. Greg Dening, “Ethnography on My Mind,” in Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17. 3. Clifton Crais, History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Brain (New York: Overlook Press, 2014), 116–17. 4. The Red Deer River’s name is said to have come from the Cree Was-ka-soo, or Elk River. A major tributary of the South Saskatchewan River and part of the South Saskatchewan–Nelson water system, the Red Deer River starts in the

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Sawback mountain range in the Rockies (in Alberta, Canada), before flowing some 450 miles and emptying into Hudson Bay. “Gylfaginning,” in The Prose Edda, trans. Jesse Byock (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 2006), 18. Crais, History Lessons, 111. William B. Taylor, “Two Shrines of the Cristo Renovado: Religion and Peasant Politics in Late Colonial Mexico,” American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (2005): 944–74; William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); William B. Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Crais, History Lessons, 159. Ibid., 18.

Contributors

Jessica Delgado is currently an assistant professor of religion at Princeton University. She earned her PhD in Latin American history at the University of California at Berkeley and was the Stewart Fellow in Religion at Princeton University from 2009 to 2012. Her field is the history of religion in Latin America with a focus on Mexico in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her research interests include women, gender, and sexuality; the Catholic Church in colonial society; race, caste, and religion; the materiality of devotion and the ways religiosity shapes people’s experience of the physical world, including their own bodies; and the intersection of social and spiritual status in the early modern world. Her forthcoming book, Troubling Devotion: Laywomen and the Church in Colonial Mexico, 1630–1770, under contract with Cambridge University Press, looks at the ways laywomen’s religiosity and diverse but daily interactions with religious authorities, institutions, symbols, and ideas shaped the devotional landscape of colonial Mexico. Delgado received a 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Award to complete this work. Nicole von Germeten is a professor of history in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University. Her ongoing work examines sexuality, religion, legal history, and gender in Spain and the Iberian empires. Her publications include books and essays on Afro-descended populations in Spanish America, focusing on Catholic brotherhoods and Jesuit

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Contributors

proselytization. Her scholarship has also explored transactional sex, honor, the history of emotions, fantasy, fashion, violence, witchcraft, sodomy, suicide, and penitential practices. Kristin Huffi ne is the acting director of the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies and an associate professor of history at Northern Illinois University. Her book Producing Christians from Half-Men and Beasts: Jesuit Ethnography and Guaraní Response in Colonial Río de la Plata is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is coeditor of Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800, published by Stanford University Press in 2008, and has been a long-term National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the John Carter Brown Library (Providence, RI), a long-term Monticello College Foundation Fellow at the Newberry Library (Chicago), and a Fulbright Fellow in Spain. Huffine is currently at work on a new study of devotion to Santiago Matamoros in colonial Mexico. Jennifer Scheper Hughes is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside. She studies the history of religion in Latin America, with special consideration for the spiritual lives of Mexican and Mexican American Catholics, focusing on popular practice, material religion, and affective approaches to the study of religion. Her book, Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2010), is a history of popular devotion to devotional images of the suffering Christ in Mexico. Seth Kimmel is an assistant professor of medieval and early modern cultural studies in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as articles appearing in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the Hispanic Issues book series, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, MLN (Modern Language Notes), Comparative Literature, the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, and elsewhere. Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara is an assistant professor of colonial Latin American history at the University of Cincinnati. Her recent (2014) publications

Contributors

269

include “Intimate Indulgences: Local Religion and Salvation in EighteenthCentury Santiago de Guatemala” in Colonial Latin American Review and “Holy Women and Hagiography in Colonial Latin America” in History Compass. Her completed book manuscript, “Alone at the Altar: Gender, Devotion, and Marriage in the Guatemalan Capital, 1670–1870” explores how the complex alliances forged between single women and the Catholic Church shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and postindependence politics in Guatemala’s capital. Sean F. McEnroe is an associate professor at Southern Oregon University, where he specializes in the history of religion, ideology, and state formation in the Atlantic world. He is the author of From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which describes the gradual integration of European and indigenous governance and the origins of Mexican citizenship. He is currently writing a comparative history of indigenous leadership within Europe’s multiethnic American empires. Karen Melvin is a professor of history and a member of the Latin American Studies Program at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Her latest scholarly venture has drawn her into the spiritual economies of the early modern world as she tracks alms collected in New Spain for the Holy Places of Jerusalem and the redemption of Christian captives from North Africa. She is the author of Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain (Stanford University Press, 2012) and a series of essays on global Catholicism. She is also a principal investigator and a cofounder of Reading the Inquisition, an online collection of transcribed and translated Inquisition cases. Kenneth Mills is the J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He investigates the history of the early modern Iberian Atlantic world, with an emphasis on religious and cultural transformations. The multiauthor and multidiscipline Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, which he coedited with Evonne Levy, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2013. Mills is writing a book about the transatlantic journey of a Spanish alms collector and image maker named Diego de Ocaña.

270

Contributors

Rachel Moore is an associate professor of history at Clemson University in South Carolina, where she serves in the Faculty-in-Residence Program. She is currently at work on a social history of the Mexican postal service and lives with her two sons and two rescue dogs. Matthew D. O’Hara received a PhD in history from the University of California, San Diego, in 2003. He is currently an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. O’Hara is a historian of colonial and nineteenth-century Latin America with a research focus on Mexico. His publications include A Flock Divided: Race, Religion and Politics in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2010) and Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, coedited with Andrew Fisher (Duke University Press, 2009). Paul Ramírez received a PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches at Northwestern University in Chicago and specializes in the history of Mexico in the colonial and early national periods. His research on public health and immunization, social responses to epidemic disease, and religious practice and experience has appeared in the journals Hispanic American Historical Review, Endeavour, and the Americas. Ramírez has been a scholar in residence at institutions such as the Newberry Library in Chicago, Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. He is currently undertaking a research project on the religious dimensions of salt production and consumption in Mexico. José Refugio de la Torre Curiel is a professor in the Department of History, Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico). He received a PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the history of interethnic contacts in northwestern New Spain, the Franciscan order in colonial Mexico, and the connections between male religious orders and the history of cartography, on which he has published several articles and chapters in academic journals and collective volumes. He is the author of Vicarios en entredicho: Crisis y desestructuración de la provincia franciscana de Santiago de Xalisco, 1749–1860 (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2001), Twilight of the Mission Frontier: Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in

Contributors

271

Sonora, 1768–1855 (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Expansión territorial y formación de espacios de poder en la Nueva España (El Colegio de Jalisco, 2016). Refugio is a member of the Seminary of New Spain’s Institutions, a co-organizer of the Seminary on Northern Mexico, a member of the editorial boards of Anuario de Estudios Americanos (Seville, Spain) and Letras Históricas (Universidad de Guadalajara), and the director of the electronic journal Intersticios Sociales (El Colegio de Jalisco). Sylvia Sellers-García received a PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an associate professor of history at Boston College, specializing in the history of colonial Latin America and the Spanish empire. She is the author of Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery (Stanford University Press, 2013), a study of how distance shaped the creation, movement, and storage of documents in colonial and early national Guatemala. Her current research focuses on social violence in the eighteenth century. Along with Karen Melvin, Sellers-García is a principal investigator and cofounder of Reading the Inquisition, an online collection of transcribed and translated Inquisition cases. Ivonne del Valle is an associate professor of colonial studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching make connections between the past and the present to show the relevance of the colonial period for an understanding of contemporary times. She was codirector of the Berkeley research group “Mexico and the Rule of Law.” She has written a book and a series of articles on the Jesuits (José de Acosta and Loyola; Jesuits in the northern borderlands of New Spain) as a particularly influential political-religious order that served modernization and the expansion of the Spanish empire.

Index

Page numbers in italic text indicate illustrations. archival sources. See primary sources Aries, Philippe, 20–21 Aristotle, 114–17, 121n14 Arriaga, Pablo José de, 118–19 Arroyave y Beteta, Rosa de, 92–93 art, 56, 127–28 audience: imagining, 172–74; inventing, 173–74; marketing and, 174; publishing venue relating to, 173; research on, 173; writing style and, 169–71, 181 Augustinians, 109, 110, 119 “Axolotl” (Cortázar), 29 Aymara Christians, 126–27

absolution, denying, 156–57, 252–53. See also solicitation cases Aburto, Manuel, 103 academic history, 169–71 accuracy, 4 Acosta, José de, 76n1; De procuranda indorum salute, 65–70, 75–76; Grafton on, 70–72, 74 Advertencias para los nuevos confesores (confession manual), 186–91, 195–99, 201–5, 207, 211; structure of, 218–23; on women, 218–22, 223nn10–11 African rituals, 56 African slaves, 53–57 African subject formation, 128–30 Aguilar, José Miguel de, 157–58 The Allure of the Archives (Farge), 14 Amith, Jonathan, 99 Andean Church, 118–19, 132n5 Andean society, 31, 43n6 anthropologists, 24–25 Apology (Plato), 116 architecture, 95n27

Baegert, Jacob, 67–68 Ballard, Martha, 14–15 baroque images and art, 56. See also Correa, Juan baroque infrastructure, 51–52 Bartolomé de Alva, Don, 190, 209, 211 Barton, David, 169 Beneke, Chris, 169 Berenguer de Marquina, Viceroy Félix, 13

273

274

Index

Bergosa y Jordán, Antonio de, 33, 38–41 blasphemy, 129 Borromeo, Carlo, 214n13 botanical knowledge, 37–38 Bourbon government, 24, 39–42, 49, 221–22 Brentano, Robert, 18 burials, 86 Burke, Peter, 33, 43n8, 45n30 Butterworth, Douglas, 105 Calvino, Italo, 22–23 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, 25–26 Capetillo, Faustino, 102 capitalism, 74 Cartagena, 51–57 casta paintings, 33 The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Calvino), 22–23 Catholicism: Church documents, 126– 30; colonization and, 31; Expectation of Mary in, 139, 141, 148–49, 151n14; Immaculate Conception in, 139, 152n26; Immaculist Cult in, 140–49; indigenous parishioners and sacrament, 201–5, 208–11; intimacy, in sacrament, 201–5; Penance and solicitation in, 156–67, 188–91, 245–46; popular culture and, 34; ritual relationships, in sacrament, 203–5; sacrament in, 9, 156–59, 188–91, 201–5, 208–11; Tenth Council of Toledo and, 151n14. See also confession Catholic Monarch, 31 Catholic saints, 109. See also Our Lady of Copacabana; Virgin Mary Catholic theology, 186–87 Chance, John, 105 change: continuity and, 137–38, 149; cultural innovation and, 149; in

local devotions, 140–49; Taylor on, 138, 149; tradition and, 70–74 Charles IV, 38 children, 87; boys’ confessions, 231–32; criados, 95n21 Christian Doctrine, 228–29 Christian evangelization, 203–4 Christianity: Andean Church and, 118– 19, 132n5; Aymara Christians, 126–27; capitalism relating to, 74; Church documents, 126–30; conformity in, 34; Council of Trent and, 34; Eire on, 34, 35, 41–42; Nahua Christians, 126–27; Native Christian subject formation, 127–28; Our Lady of Copacabana and, 117–20; pagan traditions and, 138; parish priests, 21–25; policing in, 34–35; popular culture and, 34–35, 41–42; in Reformation, 34; Spanish conquest and, 66–70, 74 Church documents, 126–30 circulation, of sources, 20 circumstances, sources and, 19–20 classification systems, 32 Claver, Peter, 56–57 Clendinnen, Inga, 1, 9, 16–17, 155; on Spanish colonialism, 217–18; writing style of, 176–77 close reading: of confession manuals, 188–91, 195–99, 203–5, 207–12; of Jesuits, 64–70, 71, 73–74; of sources, 64–65, 74–76; theory and, 7, 63–64, 75–76 Collingwood, R. G., 260 colonial architecture, 95n27 colonial healing traditions, 128–30, 132n8, 133n9 colonial Mexico: Spanish state and, 43n5; witchcraft in, 35–36 colonial subject formation, 125–30, 131n1

Index

colonization, 31 communication: diffuse documentation and, 100–107; information exchange and, 100–101; postal customs and, 101–3; in research, 103 confession: Advertencias para los nuevos confesores on, 186–91, 195–99, 201–5, 207, 211, 218–23, 223nn10– 11; advice and warnings, for confessors, 225–55; of boys, 231–32; Catholic theology on, 186–87; Christian Doctrine and, 228–29; for coarse and ignorant people, 232–34; Confessionario mayor y menor en lengua Mexicana on, 209, 211; denying absolution, 156–57, 252–53; Fifth Commandment in, 231; general advice, for confessors, 226–28; Gruzinski on, 185, 191, 192n2, 193n9; for indigenous parishioners, 201–5, 208–11; intimacy, in sacrament, 201–5; for inveterate sinners, 250–51; language in, 187, 196, 200n4, 204; manuals on, 188–91, 195–99, 203–5, 207–12, 218–23; for married people, 241–44; as narrative, 207–8, 213n4; outside of Church, 221–22; Penance and solicitation cases, 156–67, 188–91, 245–46; practice exercises, for confessors, 226; professions and, 229–30; Quintana on, 185, 192; repentance and, 252; research on, 187–88; for rough people, 211; sacramental discretion, 253–55; for shameful sinners, 246–50; sins and cases with grave consequences, 251–52; Sixth Commandment and, 236–41; for social control, 202–5, 210–11,

275

214n13; solicitation stories in, 195–99, 219, 244–46; for vile people, 235–36; women and confessor’s demeanor, 227 confessional interrogation, 210–11 Confessionario mayor y menor en lengua Mexicana (Bartolomé de Alva), 209, 211 conformity, 34 context: finding, 6; interpretation and, 7–8, 23; meaning and, 7; questions and, 6, 14; same stories, different contexts, 23; search for, 15; sources and, 7, 9; total, 6 contextualizing evidence, 15 continuity, 137–38, 149 contraband, 101–2 conversation, 22–25 La Conversion de Maria Magdalena (Correa), 57 Correa, Juan: background on, 50; blood purity investigation on, 60n15; career of, 53–54; demography and, 53–54; regionalism case study on, 50, 51, 53–54, 56–59; religion and, 51, 56–58; sacred geography and, 51 Cortázar, Julio, 29, 41 Council of Basle, 143 Council of Trent, 34, 117–18, 193n4 Counter-Reformation, 34 cowpox vaccine, 38–39 Crais, Clifton, 260, 263, 264–65 criados, 95n21 criminal cases, 178–79; solicitation cases, 9, 156–67, 188–91, 245–46 criminology, 210, 214n12 criticism, 2 cuadros de castas, 33 cultural innovation, 149 Darnton, Robert, 191

276

Index

Davis, Natalie Zemon, 47 Dawe, Wellington, 257, 258, 259–65 Dean, Carolyn, 132n5 de la Torre Curriel, José Refugio, 8–9 de León, Felipe, 114, 115–16 Delgado, Jessica, 9 del Valle, Ivonne, 7 demography, 52–55 Dening, Greg, 260 de Ortiz, Diego, 115–16 De procuranda indorum salute (Acosta), 65–70, 75–76 desire, 113–14 dichotomies, 6–7; elite-popular, 33–35, 42, 45n30; hermeneutics and, 42; Lewis on, 35–36; male-female, 35–36; mediators for eliminating, 36–37 diffuse documentation: communication and, 100–107; description of, 97–98; questions in, 98–99; synchronic history and, 105; travel literature and, 99–107 diffuse sources, 105–6 discretion, sacramental, 253–55 doctrinas, 21, 23, 27n9 documents. See primary sources driftwood, 257, 258, 259–65 dualities, 30–32 Early Latin America (Lockhart and Schwartz), 49 early modern period, 39, 70–74 economic exploitation, 66, 68–69 economic regionalism, 48, 54 economics, 52–55 Eguiluz, Paula de, 55 Eire, Carlos, 20–21, 34, 35, 41–42 elite-popular dichotomy, 33–35, 42, 45n30 emic approach, 18 emotion, 202 Enlightenment, 33, 38–39

etic approach, 20 evangelization, 65–66, 203–4, 214n16 evidence: contextualizing, 15; patterns in, 22–23; perspective relating to, 14; questions and, 14–26 exact imagining, 9, 15; concept of, 155– 56; narrative relating to, 156–67 Expectation of Mary, 139, 141, 148–49, 151n14 external sources, 18. See also secondary sources Farge, Arlette, 5, 14 Fernandez, María Josefa, 157–58 Fifth Commandment, 231 first record, 3, 4 flexibility, 25–26 Florencia, Francisco de, 142, 151n21 forgetting, 265 Foucault, Michel, 64, 70, 72–74; on colonial subject formation, 131n1; History of Sexuality, 191 Franciscans, 44n11, 54, 86, 90, 92, 126, 139, 210, 217; Immaculist Cult and, 140–49 Frasqueri, Pedro Joseph, 221–22 Freud, Sigmund, 76 friars, 13, 20, 22–25. See also Augustinians; Franciscans; mendicants; Mercedarians García, Joaquin, 157–58, 163–65 gardening, 175–76 Gavilán, Ramos, 110–11, 122n15, 122n30; on Our Lady of Copacabana, 112–19; philosophy and, 113–15 genealogies, 3, 217 geography: imaginative, 47–48; questions relating to, 7; regionalism and, 47–51; research and, 7; sacred, 51–52 Gerson, Jean, 143

Index

Gertrudis, María Marta, 163–65 Grafton, Anthony, 64, 70–74 Gramsci, Antonio, 149n2 Gruzinski, Serge, 185, 191, 192n2, 193n9 Gutiérrez, María Antonia, 161–63 health: botanical knowledge and, 37–38; colonial healing traditions, 128– 30, 132n8, 133n9; cowpox vaccine, 38–39; during Enlightenment, 38–39; herbal remedies, 37, 128– 29; medical knowledge and, 37–41; smallpox and, 32–33, 37–41, 221–22 Heller, Agnes, 137 Heller, Karl, 100 herbal remedies, 37, 128–29 hermeneutics, 42 Hernández, Francisco, 37, 44n22 Herrera, Diego de, 141–42, 151n15 Hexter, Jack, 3, 4 high-wire history, 1–5 Historia del Santuario de Nuestra Senora de Copacabana (Gavilán), 112–15 historical documents. See primary sources historical narrative, 5, 8–9 historical record, 1–4 historical schemata, 36–37 historicism, 137, 149n2 history: academic, 169–71; high-wire, 1–5; interpretive, 8; methodology, 1–4; popular, 169–71; questions and, 9; regionalism and, 48–49; research and, 257, 258, 259–65; synchronic, 105; synoptic, 4–9, 84, 89–93; theory and, 64, 65, 74–76 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 191 honor, 85 The Hour of Our Death (Aries), 20–21

277

How to Write the History of the New World (Cañizares-Esguerra), 25–26 Huamanga, Peru, 36 Huffine, Kristin, 8 Hughes, Jennifer Scheper, 9, 189 identity, 33, 43n10 idolatry, 118–19, 208, 209–10. See also Our Lady of Copacabana ignorance, 232–34 illiteracy, 33–36 imaginative geography, 47–48 imagining: audience, 172–74; exact, 9, 15, 155–67 Immaculate Conception, 139, 152n26 Immaculist Cult: Marian conception and, 144–45; Pacheco and, 144; Ruiz Colmenero and, 140–45; Segovia and, 140, 143–44; in Zapopan, Mexico, 140–49 immunization. See vaccination Inca temples, 113 Indian, use of term, 167n1 Indian idolatry, 118–19, 208, 209–10 indigenous parishioners, 201–5, 208–11 indigenous subject formation, 127–30 inequalities, 202–3 information exchange, 100–101 innovation, 149 institutions, 74 interpretation: comparisons of, 9; context and, 7–8, 23; of sources, 9 interpretive histories, 8 intimacy, in sacrament, 201–5 investigative answers, 4 jealousy, 242–43 Jefferson, Thomas, 26 Jesuits: Acosta and chronicles of, 65–71; Arriaga and, 19; close reading of, 64–70, 71, 73–74

278

Index

Juarez, Benito, 102–3 Judaism, 43n10 junta de caridad, 43n5 Katzew, Ilona, 147–48 Kimmel, Seth, 9, 188–89 Klor de Alva, Jorge, 191, 202–3 Knopf, Alfred A., 177 knowledge, 113–14, 128–30

Landa, Diego de, 210 language, 187, 196, 200n4, 204 Lanham, Richard, 182n5 Larkin, Brian, 142 Latin American regionalism, 47 Lázaro de Arregui, Domingo, 152n29 Leavitt-Alcántara, Brianna, 7–8 Leclerc, Georges-Louis, 26 legal disputes, 24–25 legality, 65, 76n2 legally oriented anthropologists, 24–25 Le Goff, Jaques, 189 León Garabito, Santiago de, 142 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 32, 42 Lewis, Laura, 35–36 literacy, 33–36 Lobo Guerrero, Bartolomé, 118 local devotions, 140–49 local religion, 55–58, 142 Lockhart, James, 49 long nineteenth century, 98, 107n1 López, Diego: demography and, 54–55; Eguiluz and, 55; regionalism case study on, 49–50, 52–59, 60n13; religion and, 55, 56–58; sacred geography and, 52 Lorenzana, Francisco Antonio, 30, 31 Los Angeles, José de, 201–2, 225 Madonna, 144 male-female dichotomy, 35–36 Mann, Charles, 175–76, 177

Many Mexicos (Simpson), 48 Marian conception, 144–45 marketing, 174 married people, 241–44 Marx, Karl, 76 material objects, 8, 14 Mayas, 217–18 McEnroe, Sean, 8, 9, 189–90 meaning: context and, 7; of Our Lady of Copacabana, 110–11; search for, 5–6; sources and, 7 mediators, 36–37 medical knowledge, 37–41 Meinig, Donald, 95n22 Melvin, Karen, 6, 259, 263–64, 265 memory, 260, 264–65 men: male-female dichotomy and, 35–36; married, 241–44; Sixth Commandment for, 237–38 mendicants, 22–24. See also Augustinians; Franciscans; friars; Mercedarians Mendieta, Geronimo de, 210 Mercedarians, 22–25 mestizos, 212, 214n19 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 114–17, 121n14 methodology: history, 1–4; investigative answers and, 4; sources and, 3–4; sustained study of, 5 Mexican-American War, 102 Mexico City, 52–53, 54, 98–107 A Midwife’s Tale (Ulrich), 14–15 migration, 31–32 Mills, Kenneth, 15 Mink, Louis, 6, 83–84 monarchy, 31, 33 Monrroy, Isabel María, 84–90 Moore, Rachel, 8 Moore, Sally Falk, 24–25 morality, 76n2 Nahua Christians, 126–27

Index

narrative: arc, 156–57, 159–61; confession as, 207–8, 213n4; exact imagining relating to, 156–67; historical, 5, 8–9 national identity, 33 Native Christian subject formation, 127–28 Navaro, Juana, 161–63 El Nayar, 67 newspapers, 101–2, 104 New World, 26; otherness of, 30; scholarship on, 70–71 A New World in a Small Place (Brentano), 18 nineteenth century documentation, 97–98 novenas, 121n11 obligations, 4–5 O’Hara, Matthew, 9 Old World, 26, 30 Order of Our Lady of Mercy, 22–25 Orsi, Robert, 201 Ortega, José, 67 otherness, 30 Our Lady of Copacabana: Andean Church and, 118–19; background on, 109–12; Christianity and, 117–20; Council of Trent and, 117–18; description of, 109–10; Gavilán and, 112–19; map showing, 111; meaning of, 110–11; nineteenth century shrine, 120; philosophy relating to, 113–17; Tito Yupanqui and, 111–18 Our Lady of the Angels, 34 Our Lady of Zapopan, 142–49, 145, 146, 147 Pacheco, Francisco, 144, 152n28 pagan traditions, 138 Panofsky, Erwin, 73

279

parallel readings, 64 parish priests, 21–25 past, 32, 260 pastoral letter, 38–41 patterns, in evidence, 22–23 Penance. See confession perspective, 8, 14 Pestana, Carla Gardina, 106, 107 Phelan, John Leddy, 210 philosophy, 113–17 Plato, 114, 116–17 playwrights, 208 Poetics (Aristotle), 115 policing, 34–35 politics, 52–55 popular culture, 106; Burke on, 33, 43n8; Catholicism and, 34; Christianity and, 34–35, 41–42; Thompson on, 43n8 popular history, 169–71 postage stamps, 102 postal customs, 101–3 power: inequalities, 202–3; institutions and, 74 predetermined reading, 15 present, 32 primary sources, 17–20; archival documents, 104–5; Church documents, 126–30; diffuse documentation, 97–107; nineteenth century documentation, 97–98; truth in, 65; wills as, 83–93 production, of sources, 19–20 professions, 229–30 property law, 86 publishing venue, 173 Queneau, Raymond, 179 questions: asking about primary sources’ who, what, where, when, why, and how, 18–19;

280

Index

questions (continued) beyond field, 21–22; on circulation of sources, 20; context and, 6, 14; in diffuse documentation, 98–99; evidence and, 14–26; flexibility in, 25–26; geography relating to, 7; good, 16–17; history and, 9; in interpretive histories, 8; for primary sources, 17–20; on production of sources, 19–20; for secondary sources, 20–22; by sources, 19; for sources in conversation, 22–25; “so what” test for, 16–17; types of, 6; unanswered, 4–5; unasked, 21 Quintana, Augustín de, 185, 192 Ramírez, Paul, 6–7, 9, 190–91 reading, 2–3, 15. See also close reading Red Deer River, 260, 265n4 Redfield, Robert, 45n30 Reformation, 34, 117–18 regionalism: continuing legacies of, 58–60; in Correa case study, 50, 51, 53–54, 56–59; defining, 47–51; demography, economics, and politics, 52–55; economic, 48; geography and, 47–51; history and, 48–49; hypotheses on, 48–50; Latin American, 47; local religion and, 55–58; in López case study, 49–50, 52–59, 60n13; sacred geography and baroque infrastructure, 51–52; Simpson on, 48; Taylor on, 48–49; Van Young on, 48 religion: Andean Church and, 118–19, 132n5; burials and, 86; Correa and, 51, 56–58; Council of Trent relating to, 34, 117–18, 193n4; evangelization, 65–66, 203–4, 214n16; identity and, 43n10;

Indian idolatry, 118–19, 208, 209– 10; local devotions, 140–49; local religion and regionalism, 55–58; López and, 55, 56–58; monarchy and, 31, 33; pastoral letter, 38–41; power inequalities in, 202–3; secularization, eighteenth century, 21–22; smallpox vaccination relating to, 38–41; for social control, 202–5, 210–11, 214n13; during Spanish Inquisition, 56, 82, 133n10, 156–67, 210–11; in wills, 88–92; women and, 81–82. See also specific religions religious emotions, 202 religious experience, 202 religious studies, 201–2 religious tolerance, 99, 105–6 repentance, 252 Republic (Plato), 114 research: approaches to, 6, 13–14; on archival documents, 104; on audience, 173; communication in, 103; on confession, 187–88; geography and, 7; history and, 257, 258, 259–65 revisionists, 70–71 rich primary sources, 13 Ricoeur, Paul, 217–18 ritual relationships, 203–5 rituals, 56 Rodríguez, Antonio, 53–54 Ruiz Colmenero, Juan, 140–45 sacrament: indigenous parishioners and, 201–5, 208–11; intimacy in, 201–5; ritual relationships in, 203–5; solicitation cases, confession, and, 9, 156–67, 188–91, 245– 46. See also confession sacramental discretion, 253–55 sacred geography, 51–52

Index

Said, Edward, 47–48 Saint Augustine, 112 Sánchez, Martín, 55 Sandoval, Tomás de, 161–63 Santa Catarina, Juan de, 205 Santoyo, Pascuala de, 54–55 Sartorius, Carl, 100 Schmidt, Henry, 99, 104 scholarly schemata, 36–37 Schwartz, Stuart, 49, 99, 105 Scotus, John Duns, 143 scripts, 207–8 sculptures, 109. See also Our Lady of Copacabana secondary sources, 20–22 second record, 3 secularization, 21–22 Segesser, Philipp, 68–69 Segovia, Antonio de, 140, 143–44 Sellers-García, Sylvia, 9, 259, 263–64, 265 sexual solicitation. See solicitation cases; solicitation stories Shrines and Miraculous Images (Taylor), 4, 16 Simpson, Lesley Byrd, 48 sinners: inveterate, 250–51; shameful, 246–50; sins and cases with grave consequences, 251–52 Sixth Commandment: confession and, 236–41; for men, 237–38; for women, 238–41 smallpox, 221–22; vaccination for, 32–33, 37–41 Smith, Jonathan Z., 43n10 social awareness, 73 social control, 202–5, 210–11, 214n13 social mobility, 54 societal structural foundations, 149n2 solicitation cases: defining solicitation, 156–57; Fernandez case, 157–58; Gertrudis case, 163–65;

281

Gutiérrez and Navaro case, 161– 63; Penance, sacrament, and, 9, 156–67, 188–91, 245–46; during Spanish Inquisition, 156–67; witnesses in, 159–63; women in, 9, 156–67, 188–91, 245–46 solicitation stories, 195–99, 219, 244–46 sorcery, 129 sources: beyond field, 21–22; circulation of, 20; circumstances and, 19–20; close reading of, 64–65, 74–76; confession manuals as, 207–12, 218–23; context and, 7, 9; in conversation, 22–25; diffuse, 105–6; external, 18; from genealogies, 217; interpretation of, 9; in interpretive histories, 8; limitations of, 17; meaning and, 7; methodology and, 3–4; predetermined reading of, 15; primary, 17–20; production of, 19–20; questions by, 19; rich primary, 13; secondary, 20–22 “so what” test, 16–17 Span, 21–25 Spanish colonialism: in “Axolotl,” 29; Clendinnen on, 217–18; Mayas and, 217–18; Spanish state and colonial Mexico, 43n5 Spanish conquest: Christianity and, 66–70, 74; economic exploitation during, 66, 68–69; legality of, 65, 76n2; morality of, 76n2; violence of, 65, 66 Spanish imperial science, 129–30 Spanish-Indian duality, 30–31 Spanish Inquisition, 56, 82, 133n10; confessional interrogation during, 210–11; solicitation cases during, 156–67 Spanish property law, 86 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 100

282

Index

Stephens, Randall, 169 Stern, Steve, 36 stories: same stories, different contexts, 23; solicitation, 195–99, 219, 244– 46; telling, 155 subaltern knowledge, 128–30 subalterns, 130, 132n4 subjectivity, 72–73 sustained study, of methodology, 5 synchronic history, 105 syncretism, 125 synoptic history, 4–9, 84, 89–93 synoptic thinking, 83–84 Taylor, William, 4, 15, 16–17, 83–84; on change, 138, 149; on local religion, 142; on regionalism, 48–49; on syncretism, 125 Tenth Council of Toledo, 151n14 theory: close reading and, 7, 63–64, 75; history and, 64, 65, 74–76 Thomas Aquinas, 122n30 Thompson, E. P., 5, 43n8, 83 time, 42 Tito Yupanqui, Francisco, 111–18 tolerance, religious, 99, 105–6 total context, 6 Townsend, Camilla, 16–17 tradition: Burke on, 45n30; change and, 70–74; pagan, 138 travel literature, 99–107 truth, 65 Tutino, John, 16–17 Ubeda, María de, 91–92 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 14–15, 81 unanswered questions, 4–5 unasked questions, 21 urbanism, 105 urbanization, 105 vaccination: cowpox vaccine, 38–39;

immunization methods, 38; for smallpox, 32–33, 37–41 Valladolid, 76n2, 212 Van Young, Eric, 48 Veracruz, 98–107 Villa-Flores, Javier, 16 violence, 65, 66 Virgin Mary, 109, 139; in Immaculist Cult, 140–49; Our Lady of Zapopan, 142–49, 145, 146, 147. See also Our Lady of Copacabana Virgin of Guadalupe, 56 von Germeten, Nicole, 7 von Humboldt, Alexander, 100 Walter, Phillipe, 138 well-behaved women, 81–82 will makers, 82–83, 93n6 wills, 83–93; of Arroyave y Beteta, 92–93; as historical documents, 83–93; of Monrroy, 84–90; religion in, 88–92; of Ubeda, 91–92; of women, 84–93, 93n6 witchcraft, 55; in colonial Mexico, 35–36; sorcery and, 129 women: Advertencias para los nuevos confesores on, 218–22, 223nn10– 11; confessor’s demeanor with, 227; honor for, 85; married, 241– 44; religion and, 81–82; sixth Commandment for, 238–41; in solicitation cases, 9, 156–67, 188– 91, 245–46; in solicitation stories, 195–99, 219, 244–46; in Spanish property law, 86; status of, 85; well-behaved, 81–82; wills of, 84–93, 93n6 Wright, Barbara, 179 writing style, 9; audience and, 169–71, 181; being consistent with, 181; choosing writing styles you like, 175–77; of Clendinnen, 176–77; of

Index

confession manuals, 207–8; developing distinct styles, 174– 80; examining previous writing, 180; of Mann, 175–76, 177; practicing different styles, 177–78; scripts, 207–8 Zapopan, Mexico, 139–40; Immaculist Cult in, 140–49 Zinn, Howard, 169

283