Local Religion In Colonial Mexico

The ten essays in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico provide information about the religious culture in colonial Mexico.

Applying a great variety of both Spanish and indigenous sources, this book provides a new insight into the essential impact of the Catholic Reformation on ritual practices in the native Indian parishes of early-colonial southern Mexico.

This nuanced book considers the role of religion and religiosity in modern Mexico, breaking new ground with an emphasis on popular religion and its relationship to politics. The contributors highlight the multifaceted role of religion, illuminating the ways that religion and religious devotion have persisted and changed since Mexican independence. They explore such themes as the relationship between church and state, the resurgence of religiosity and religious societies in the post-reform period, the religious values of the liberals of the 1850s, and the ways that popular expressions of religion often trumped formal and universal proscriptions. Focusing on individual stories and vignettes and on local elements of religion, the contributors show that despite efforts to secularize society, religion continues to be a strong component of Mexican culture. Portraying the complexity of religiosity in Mexico in the context of an increasingly secular state, this book will be invaluable for all those interested in Latin American history and religion. Contributions by: Silvia Marina Arrom, Adrian Bantjes, Alejandro Cortázar, Jason Dormady, Martin Austin Nesvig, Matthew D. O'Hara, Daniela Traffano, Paul J. Vanderwood, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, Pamela Voekel, and Edward Wright-Rios

In Tongues of Fire, Nancy Farriss investigates the role of language and translation in the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of unfamiliar local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. Farriss shows that the dialogue arising from these efforts produced a new, culturally hybrid form of Christianity that had become firmly established by the end of the 17th century. The study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role within the Dominican program of evangelization to the larger context of cultural contact in post-conquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts reveals the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse. Spotlighting the importance of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity, Farriss shows how their participation as translators and parish administrators helped to make evangelization an indigenous enterprise, and the new Mexican church an indigenous one.

Genealogical Fictions examines how the state, church, Inquisition, and other institutions in colonial Mexico used the Spanish notion of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) over time and how the concept's enduring religious, genealogical, and gendered meanings came to shape the region's patriotic and racial ideologies.

Nahua and Maya Catholicisms examines ecclesiastical texts written in Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya to illustrate the role of these texts in conveying and reflecting various Catholic messages--and thus Catholicisms--throughout colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan. It demonstrates how published and unpublished sermons, confessional manuals, catechisms, and other religious texts betray "official" and "unofficial" versions of Catholicism, and how these versions changed throughout the colonial period according to indigenous culture, local situations, and broader early modern events. The book's study of these texts also allows for a better appreciation of the negotiations that occurred during the evangelization process between native and Spanish cultures, the center and periphery, and between official expectations and everyday realities. And by employing both Nahuatl and Maya religious texts, Nahua and Maya Catholicism allows for a uniquely comparative study that expands beyond Central Mexico to include Yucatan.

Here, Jennifer Scheper Hughes traces popular devotion to the Cristo Aparecido over five centuries of Mexican history. Each chapter investigates a single incident in the encounter between believers and the image.

After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples—a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century. The author's innovative interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy. Tavárez contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.

William Taylor explores the use of local and regional shrines, and devotion to images of Christ and Mary, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, to get to the heart of the politics and practices of faith in Mexico before the Reforma.