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University of Nevada Reno The Culture of the Good Death in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by James Courtney Flaks Dr. Linda A Curcio-Nagy/Dissertation Advisor May 2010 THE GRADUATE SCHOOL We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by JAMES COURTNEY FLAKS entitled "The Culture of the Good Death in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City" be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, Ph.D., Advisor Joseba Zulaika, Ph.D., Committee Member Dennis Dworkin, Ph.D., Committee Member Judith Whitenack, Ph.D., Committee Member Kevin Stevens, Ph.D., Committee Member George Thomas, Ph.D., Graduate School Representative Marsha H. Read, Ph. D., Associate Dean, Graduate School May, 2010 i Abstract This dissertation argues that most of Mexico City’s Seventeenth-century subjects believed in and practiced the Good Death. The culture of the Good Death in seventeenth- century Mexico City shows that their Mexican Catholicism represented a localized religious practice that was completely hispanicized. Death permeated Mexico City’s population base due to cyclical pandemics, seasonal natural disasters, such as inundations, agricultural crises, and the common public health issues concerning garbage in the city’s canals and streets. Most of Mexico City’s subjects often lived short and harsh lives. According to colonial citizens, the beliefs and practices of the Good Death signified the partaking of final sacraments and a courage in facing the end of life where the dying person ultimately liberated his/her soul into the purgatorial afterworld. Most urban subjects understood the basic beliefs and practices of Spanish Catholicism. I show that Mexico City’s priests were the intecessors of Spanish Catholic practices and the theology of the Good Death to lay parishioners. Mexico City’s elite subjects paid for and practiced the images of the Good Death according to the arrangements of Baroque funeral rites, especially for the death of the Spanish Monarch and high colonial elites, called exequias. Protecting both their souls and family honor, they arranged detailed will and testaments, which included confessions of faith, paid masses for their souls in Purgatory, and some pious works. For Nahua elite subjects, it meant fewer altar masses, but their preferred rites included a funeral with paid singers, and a Christian burial inside of a church. Confraternities ensured both the images and rites of the Good Death for members who paid their regular sodality fees. Confraternity ii death benefits included burial in a church altar, fabrics over the coffin, the attendance of confraternity brothers and sisters in the funeral, and the confratenity priest performing masses for the souls of the deceased. In conclude that due to the problems in locating a priest that was able to minister the last sacraments, Mexico City’s general population, both the popular classes and elites, inserted magical prayers at saint altars asking for good deaths in avoidance of bad ones. A bad death signified a sudden and often violent death with no pious preparations beforehand. iii Table of Contents Abstract i Chapter I Introduction 1 Chapter II ''Public Health in the Seventeenth-Century'' 28 Chapter III ''The Good Death in Christian Theology'' 66 Chapter IV "Elite Practices and the Image of the Good Death" 100 Chapter V ''Confraternities and Ensuring the Good Death'' 145 Chapter VI "Popular Piety between Good and Bad Deaths" 178 Conclusion 206 Bibliography 214 1 Chapter I: Introduction In Mexico City, 1622, the royal criminal court condemned three robbers to a public hanging in the main square. The three condemned prisoners, Pedro de Silva Spanish of low calidad (low social worth), Francisco Ramirez mulato (mulatto of African and European descent), and Jorge Cardoso mestizo (mixed Spanish and native), represented the lower classes that lived and survived in Mexico City. However, before their deaths, they managed to have their cases transferred to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The Inquisitors did not concern themselves with their past criminal activities; instead, they focused on the fact that the prisoners had admitted to ingesting peyote, a hallucinogen, originating from a natural growing cactus in northern Mexico. All three criminals told fantastic tales about the powers of peyote. As the Inquisitors asked their pointed questions, each successive tale became more lurid than the previous testimony. According to the men, peyote granted the power to walk through doors and to break out of jail cells; and, it helped individuals to die, and helped them to know when to die, ‘all in a good state,’ implying a good death. Another mixed race associate of the robbers, Gabriel Moreno, also condemned to the rope, confessed that he too wanted to die well, and took peyote with the others in order to know the future of his impending death.1 In the end, the Inquisitors never uncovered what a good death, or a bad death meant according to these men. Nor did the Inquisitors often pursue these types of cases surrounding death and death practices in multi-ethnic seventeenth-century Mexico City. The Inquisitors focused completely on their peyote use, rather than the criminals’ 1 AGN, ramo Inquisción, caja 341, expediente 4, fojas 314r-321r. 2 ideas about death. The three robbers represented a small and marginalized subgroup within colonial Mexico City. The significance of this case is that the concern for dying well even affected this marginalized criminal element of castas (mixed race people). This brief tale raises several questions about popular piety in colonial Mexico. What did it mean to die well in the seventeenth-century Mexico City? How did Mexico City’s subjects understand and accept their deaths? How did they achieve a semblance of control over dying and death? Was there a bad death as well as a good one? How did they conceptualize the afterlife? What role did Catholicism play and how did citizens understand the orthodox theology concerning death? The answers to these questions are essential to understanding life in the capital because it was an urban environment permeated by death. Its subjects lived precarious and short lives. Citizens needed spiritual protection to avoid falling under the sentence of a bad sudden death. The Catholic Church originally introduced the idea of the Good Death to the general population of the capital. Although extremely heterogeneous, the capital had the highest rates of acculturation in colonial New Spain. Consequently, the seventeenth-century, this colonial capital was composed of an ethnically diverse, but hispanicized and nominally Catholic population that shared a belief in Good Death practices. This dissertation describes how Catholic theologians and priests presented the Good Death theology to the masses and how ideas about death and salvation were manifested in the cultural and religious milieu of the capital, sometimes with surprising results. This dissertation argues that the majority of Mexico City’s seventeenth-century subjects believed and practiced Good Death popular piety. Three segments of society and 3 their death practices are of issue. The first area examines the elites and how they understood, lavishly paid for, and practiced the image of the Good Death. The second area focuses on the religious confraternities that had a more diverse, both socially and ethnically, membership base, and how they sought to ensure the Good Death for their members. The third area analyzes anonymous prayers asking for good deaths left at saint altars, as well as cases of bad death. All three source materials describe a culture of the Good Death, which helped transform Mexican Catholicism into a living practice among most social classes and ethnic groups. The culture of the Good Death also functioned through acts of solidarity between the city’s diverse subjects who were often separated through a rigid social hierarchy. Elites used confraternity participation during their funeral rites, confraternities ensured Good Death practices for all members regardless of class and ethnic distinctions, and the anonymous prayers left at saint altars were shared and often reused among parishioners due to their formulaic style of prose. All residents of Mexico City, from Spanish and native nobles to casta criminals, had their appointed times for their deaths. The culture of the Good Death offered the good life of the Christian, including salvation in the afterlife, for all of Mexico City’s subjects who were prepared to die. For Mexico City’s seventeenth-century subjects, the Good Death transformed the legacy of the good life. The first part of the good life ensured the right preparations for dying person's end of life rituals, which included a partaking of the sacraments, a final communion and last rites, or if there were no priests nearby, then the dying person performed magical Christian prayers to intercessory saints. The second part of the good life practice advocated a courageous performance in facing the last moments of life, 4 regardless of the circumstances. After the Good Death, the deceased had hopefully already liberated his/her soul into a better afterlife. In the case of the three prisoners, their peyote visions and induced prayers only gave them a short respite inside the Inquisition’s secret prison cells. If they wanted the Good Death, then they had to publicly confess their sins, take the final sacraments, and stand courageously before their executioners. By analyzing ideas and practices about death, this work has brought forth the life and practices of popular Catholicism in seventeenth-century Mexico City. The greater purpose of this research focused on understanding colonial cultural belief systems, such as the meanings of religious language terms, the symbolism related to popular piety, and the ritual performances of Mexico City’s seventeenth-century residents.

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