Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe the Formation of Mexican National Consciousness 1531-1813

Jacques Lafaye Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness 1531-1813 Translated by Benjamin Keen With a Foreword by Octavio Paz Jacques Lafaye Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness 1531-1813 With a Foreword by Octavio Paz Translated by BENJAMIN KEEN The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Originally published as Quetzalc6atl et Guadalupe, © 1974 Editions Gallimard The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1976 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1976 Paperback edition 1987 Printed in the United States of America 96 95 94 654 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lafaye, Jacques. Quetzalc6ad and Guadalupe. Translation of Quetzalc6atl et Guadalupe. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mexico—Civilization—History. 2. Mexico— Religion. 3. Guadalupe, Nuestra Senora de. 4. Quetzalc6atl. I. Tide. F1210.L313 972 75-20889 ISBN 0-226-46788-0 To my wife, Simonne and children, Etienne, Jean-Jacques, and Olivier 1 I ____ _ Contents Foreword by Octavio Paz ix Acknowledgments xxiii Chronology xxv A Historian’s Profession of Faith 1 Part 1. New Spain from the Conquest to Independence (1521-1821) 1. Brothers and Enemies: Spaniards and Creoles 7 2. Irreconcilable Enemies: Indians, Mestizos, Mulattoes 12 3. The Inquisition and the Pagan Underground 18 4. The Indian, a Spiritual Problem (1524-1648) 30 5. The Creole Utopia of the “Indian Spring” (1604-1700) 51 6. The Spiritual Emancipation (1728-1759) 77 7. The Holy War (1767-1821) 99 Part 2. Quetzalcoatl, or the Phoenix Bird 8. The First Franciscans 139 9. The Genesis of the Creole Myth 149 10. Saint Thomas-Quetzalcoatl, Apostle of Mexico 177 11. Epilogue: The “Four Hundred” Modern Quetzalcoatls 207 Part 3. Guadalupe, or the New Epiphany 12. Holy Mary and Tonantzin 211 13. The Infancy of Guadalupe 231 14. The Dispute of the Apparitions 254 15. Guadalupe, a Mexican National Emblem 274 16. Epilogue: Guadalupe Today 299 17. Perspectives 301 Notes 313 Index 333 vii Foreword The Flight of Quetzalcoatl and the Quest for Legitimacy Imagination is the faculty that reveals the hidden relations between things. It does not matter that in the poet it works upon phenomena which relate to the world of sensibility, in the scientist upon natural facts and processes, and in the historian upon the events and person ages of societies of the past. In all three cases, the discovery of secret affinities and repulsions makes visible what was invisible. Poets, scien tists, and historians show us the other side of things, the hidden face of language, nature, or the past. But their results are different: the poet produces metaphors, the scientist natural laws, and the historian—-just what does the historian produce? The poet aspires to a unique image which will resolve into its unity and singularity the multiple richness of the world. Poetic images are like the angels of Catholicism: each is a species in itself. They are unique and universal. At the other extreme, the scientist reduces individuals to series, changes to tendencies, and tendencies to laws. For poetry, repetition spells impoverishment; for science, repetition is the regularity that confirms hypotheses. The exception is the poet’s reward and the scientist’s punishment. The historian stands between the poet and the scientist. His kingdom, like that of the poet, is the kingdom of particular cases and facts which are not repeated; at the same time, like the scientist before natural phenomena, the historian operates on series of events which he tries to reduce, not to species and families, but to tendencies and currents. Historical events are not ruled by laws, or, at least, these laws have not been discovered. The Newtons and Einsteins of history are still to be born. Yet it is perfectly clear that each society, each epoch, is some thing more than an ensemble of disparate facts, persons, realities, and ideas. A unity arisen from the collision of contradictory tendencies and forces, each epoch is a community of tastes, needs, principles, institutions, and techniques. The historian searches for historical coherence—a modest equivalent of the order of nature—and this search relates him to the scientist. But the form that this coherence assumes is that of the poetic fable: novel, drama, epic poem. Historical ix x Foreword events rhyme with each other, and the logic that governs their de velopment does not evoke axioms but a space in which echoes and correspondences combine and separate. History is one with science in its methods and with poetry in its vision. Like science, it is a discovery; like poetry, a new creation. By contrast with science and poetry, history does not invent or explore worlds; it reconstructs, refashions the world of the past. Its knowledge is not a knowledge that transcends itself; I mean to say that history does not include any metahistory, like that which is offered by those chimerical systems which certain men of genius, a Marx or a Saint Augustine, conceive from time to time. Nor is it knowledge in the strict sense of the word. Situated between ethnology (description of societies) and poetry (imagination), history is empirical rigor and aesthetic sympathy, a mixture of pity and irony. Rather than being knowledge, it is wisdom. That is the true historical tradition of the West, from Herodotus to Michelet, from Tacitus to Henry Adams. To that tradition belongs the remarkable book of Jacques Lafaye about two myths of New Spain: Quetzalcoatl-Saint Thomas and Tonantzin-Guadalupe. Lafaye’s study belongs to the history of ideas or, more precisely, to that of beliefs. Ortega y Gasset thought that the substance of history, its marrow, was not the ideas but rather what the ideas covered up: beliefs. A man is better defined by his beliefs than by his ideas. Other historians prefer to define societies by their techniques. That is their right, but it remains true that techniques, like ideas, change more rapidly than beliefs. The tractor has replaced the cart and Marxism has replaced scholasticism, but the magic of the Neolithic and the astrology of Babylon still flourish in New York, Paris, and Moscow. Lafaye’s book is an admirable description of the beliefs of New Spain during the three centuries of its existence. Complex beliefs in which two syncretisms blend: Spanish Catholicism and the Aztec religion. The first, marked by its agelong coexistence with Islam, by its crusad ing spirit and obsession with the end of the world; the second, likewise the militant religion of a chosen people. The mass of believers was as complex as their beliefs: the Indian peoples (each with its own lan guage and tradition), the Spaniards (also divided in race and lan guage), the creoles, the mestizos, the mulattoes. Against this flam boyant background unfold the two myths studied by Lafaye. Both were born in the pre-Hispanic world and refashioned in the seven teenth century by minds who joined nascent modern thought with medieval tradition (Descartes and Thomas Aquinas). The two myths, and especially that of Guadalupe, were transformed into symbols and banners of the War of Independence and have come down to our own L xi Foreword day not as the speculations of theologians or ideologues but as images arisen from the collective consciousness. The Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments and defeats, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery. Historical reconstructions are also archaeological digs in the histori cal subsoil. A society is composed of its institutions, its intellectual and artistic creations, its techniques, its material and spiritual life. It also includes all that is found behind or below those things. The metaphor which designates this hidden reality changes according to the schools, generations, and historians: historical factors, roots, cells, infrastruc tures, foundations, strata.. .. Metaphors borrowed from agriculture, biology, geology, architecture, all these names evoke a hidden reality, masked by appearances. Historical reality has many ways of conceal ing itself. A most effective way consists in displaying itself in the full view of all. Lafaye’s book is a magnificent example of my point: the world that it reveals to us—the society of the viceroyalty of Mexico in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—is a world which we all knew but which no one had yet seen. Studies of the subject abound, yet none had shown us that world in all its uniqueness. Lafaye reveals to us an unknown world, unknown not because it remained hidden from us but, on the contrary, because its visibility blinded us. His book obliges us to rub our eyes and admit to ourselves that we have been victims of a strange historical optical illusion. New Spain: that name describes a singular society and a no less singular destiny. It was a society that passionately denied its antece dents and its ancestors—the Indian world and the Spanish world— and at the same time formed ambiguous links with both; in its turn, that society was to be denied by modern Mexico. Mexico would not be what it is without New Spain, but Mexico is not New Spain; indeed, it is its negation. The society of New Spain was a world which was born, grew, and then expired the moment it reached its maturity. Mexico killed it. The historical optical illusion is neither fortuitous nor inno cent. We do not see New Spain because, if we saw it as it really is, we would see all that we neither could nor wished to be. That which we could not be—a universal empire; that which we did not want to be—a hierarchical society governed by a church-state.

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