Materiality and Community in the Mixteca

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Institutional Repository of the Ibero-American Institute, Berlin Materiality and Community in the Mixteca John Monaghan Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA [email protected] Abstract: Observers have long lamented the fractured political terrain of rural Central Mexico. Oaxaca, for example, has about 4 % of the country’s population but almost 25 % of its municipalities. e ssioning that occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries was predated by a construction boom. Churches, parish houses, cemeteries and, later on, schools and com- munal buildings were built at an unprecedented rate. ese eorts were often understood by outsiders as expression of faith or of a desire for progress. is chapter suggests that insiders viewed the construction – and occasional destruction – of buildings as contentious social and political claims. Keywords: church construction; social and political claims; Mixteca; Mexico; 19th - 20th centuries. Resumen: Mucho tiempo se ha lamentado el terreno político fracturado del Centro de México rural. Oaxaca, por ejemplo, cuenta con el 4 % de la población del país pero más de 25 % de sus municipalidades. La sura que ocurrió en el siglo diecinueve y veinte fue anti cipada por un auge constructivo. Iglesias, parroquias, cementerios y más tarde, escuelas y casas comunales fueron construidos a un ritmo sin precedente. Estos esfuerzos fueron entendidos por gente externa muchas veces como de una expresión de creencia o de un deseo por el progreso. Esta contribución sugiere que la gente misma vio las construcciones y ocasionalmente las destrucciones de edicios más bien como contenciosos reclamos sociales y políticos. Palabras clave: construcción de iglesias; reclamos políticos y sociales, Mixteca, México, siglos - . Introduction In the late 1870s people began building a new church in Santiago Nuyoo, a small, Mixtec-speaking community in the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. eir goal was to replace an earlier adobe church with one that would have walls of stone, brick and mortar, and construct a vaulted ceiling for it instead of putting on a thatch roof. Accord- ing to oral history the women of the town, early in the morning, before beginning their usual daily labors, would go down to the river banks and ll baskets with sand. It was still dark, and they would have to lug the baskets up a canyon to the work site. ey each made two exhausting trips so that the builders would have enough sand for the day’s work. An architect, stone masons and skilled carpenters led the project. People in the town performed the manual labor, and raised the cash needed to pay the salaries of the men brought in from the outside. During the church construction Nuyootecos 276 John Monaghan liquidated a great deal of collectively held assets; the mayordomos contributed 1,818 pesos between 1879 and 1883 by selling animals owned by the Cofradía del Rosario and draining the cash held the wooden chests where each mayordomía stored its valuables.1 e Nuyootecos were not the only ones who built a church in the region in the 1800s. In fact, over one hundred churches were constructed in rural settlements of the Mixteca in the fty years between 1830 and 1880. is went on despite a series of armed conicts that wracked Mexico beginning in the 1850s, and that crippled the region’s economy. Not all of these churches were built on the grand scale of the Nuyooteco church, and the people in smaller settlements generally lacked the resources to use any- thing other than traditional materials like adobe and thatch. However, there were many that were like the Nuyoo church, in that they represented an enormous investment of labor and resources by townspeople. When asked to evaluate the cost of these constructions, towns reported that the church was worth many times the value of all other public constructions – municipal buildings, jails, schools – added together. For example, the people from Miltepec, in Huajuapan, reported spending 2,000 pesos on their church, completed in 1846, compared to 123 pesos on the municipal oces, jail, cemetery and the rectory they constructed between 1861 and 1882. e people of Sabanillo reported that the chapel they built in 1876 cost 800 pesos, while the municipal building, jail, and cemetery together were worth 38 pesos (Memoria Constitucional 1883: 4-17). To give an added sense of the scale of the investment, at the time they built their church, all the land of Sabanillo was worth 2,000 pesos.2 What was driving this extensive and expensive program of church construction? ere is no single answer. It was, rst and foremost, an act of piety. It also takes place during a time when Liberal and Conservatives were competing for power, and church construction can be seen as one of a number of popular expressions of support for the Catholic Church. But if these were the sole explanations, one would expect the distribution of church construction to be fairly uniform across the Mixteca. It was not. Of the 118 churches and chapels built in the fty year period between 1830 and 1880, 96 of them went up in just two districts: Silacayoapan and Huajuapan. In the districts bordering these two, Tlaxiaco, where Nuyoo is located, saw 12 churches built, ve were built in Teposcolula, four in Juxtlahuaca, one in Coixtlahuaca, and none in Nochixtlán.3 1 “Todo lo que se paga por los albañiles que van a fabricar el templo del presente pueblo” (dated January 19, 1880, but accounts run from 1879 to 1883) (Archivo del Maestro Eliazar Perez, Santiago Nuyoo). 2 e price is mentioned in a report by Fernando Mancilla to the Agrarian Delegate in 1937 (Archivo del Registro Agrario Nacional, Delegación Oaxaca, San Jose Sabanillo, 23/252). 3 Memoria Constitucional (1883). e information on the Huajuapan district is supplemented by: Noticia de los edicios públicos que tiene cada poblado, hacienda y rancho con expresión de matera en que están construido y época de su fundación, July 20, 1897 (Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca, Gobierno de los Distritos, Huajuapan, Leg. 55 exp. 2). Materiality and Community in the Mixteca 277 When examining the distribution of new churches erected in the 19th century Mix- teca one can hold constant a number of factors that one might think would be important in explaining the phenomenon. Although the makeup of the districts changed somewhat over the course of the 19th century, the number of towns and hamlets in these places stayed pretty much the same, so the large number of churches built in 19th century Huajuapan and Silacayoapan was not simply because there were more settlements in these districts. Also towns outside district capitals in the Mixteca were mostly indigenous, catholic, and made up of farmers. is is not to say that populations were completely homogeneous, but when comparing one district to another one really can’t pinpoint any major divergence in ethnicity, occupation or religious aliation that might explain the dierences in church construction. One could reasonably argue that there some historical developments that distinguish districts from one another and that might account for at least some of the dierence in church construction. Coixtlahuaca, Teposcolula, and Nochixtlán were early centers of evangelization, and some splendid colonial churches were built around the colonial administrative centers of these districts in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. ere was therefore no need, in some cases, to upgrade adobe and thatch church buildings with ones constructed by skilled architects and masons. However, this explanation can only be taken so far. In the coastal region of the Mixteca, many of the indigenous communities that were even more distant from early colonial centers of evangelization continued to use their old adobe and thatch churches in the 19th century without feeling the need to invest the time, eort and resources in building new places of worship like the one that went up in Nuyoo. Another explanation for the high number of new churches built in Huajuapan and Silacayoapan is the earthquake that struck the region in 1864 and toppled at least some towns’ churches. Such was the case of Yodoyuxi, in Huajuapan, whose people began rebuilding their church in 1865. But again, this is only a partial explanation for sub regional dierences in church construction. If we remove from the calculations all the churches begun ve years after 1864 (twelve in Huajuapan, one in Silacayoapan) the large dierences in church building between districts remains. Clearly, something is happening in Silacayoapan and Huajuapan at this time that is not happening in the other districts. To come to a more complete understanding of why churches were being built where they were in the 19th century Mixteca, it will be important, as the editor to this volume proposes, to examine how they “are embedded within a process of commu- nication that shapes and reshapes their meaning”4 and the specic local reasons why at this point in time people in Huajuapan and Silacayoapan were so intent on altering their landscape by creating newly powerful buildings. 4 Graña-Behrens in this volume, page 9. 278 John Monaghan 19th century churches and the materialization of interests In the 19th century, as is largely true today, local settlements were responsible for the building and maintenance of their churches; to put this another way, churches in the Mixteca were built by communities, and part of what people were therefore doing when they put up a new church was saying something about themselves and the town or hamlet where they lived. e idea that the community is inseparably linked to its church is an old one in Mexico – Hamman (2011: 60-61, 465-484), for example discusses how, in the infamous Inquisition trail of Yanhuitlán, held in the 1540s, testimony on the state of the church – its lack of upkeep and ornaments – was taken as direct evidence of the moral state of the Yanhuitlán leaders who were on trial.

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