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Lara-000.FM 3/14/08 6:54 PM Page iii Christian Texts forAztecs ..... ............. Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico JAIME LARA . ................. University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana © 2008 University of Notre Dame Press Lara-000.FM 3/14/08 6:54 PM Page iv Copyright © 2008 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lara, Jaime, 1947– Christian texts for Aztecs : art and liturgy in colonial Mexico / Jaime Lara. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. -13: 978-0-268-03379-8 (cloth : alk. paper) -10: 0-268-03379- (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Aztecs—Missions. 2. Aztecs—Religion. 3. Missions, Spanish—Mexico—History. 4. Catholic Church—Missions— Mexico—History. 5. Liturgical adaptation. 6. Christianity and culture —Mexico. I. Title. 1219.3. 59 37 2008 266'.208997452— dc22 2007050453 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. © 2008 University of Notre Dame Press Lara-00.Intro 3/14/08 11:57 AM Page 1 ............................. Introduction The greatest thing since the creation of the world, save the nation Nahuas, and it was their language that the mendicant Incarnation and death of Him who created it, is the dis- missionaries—Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians— covery of the Indies that are thus called the New World. adopted as the lingua franca of the evangelization enterprise.1 —Francisco López de Gómara, 1551 In the study of the New World, and especially in the inter- pretation of the conquest and evangelization, it has been easy to take sides and to paint individuals and events in either black T G L or white, as does Francisco López de Gómara, quoted in the epigraph above.2 In approaching the topic of this book, I shall This book is about the visual imagination and about worship, attempt to create a via media between a type of extremism that the worship that the early Catholic missionaries to New Spain was typical of nineteenth-century positivism and twentieth- (colonial Mexico) imported, imposed, and reinvented with the century reactionism but that goes back to even more remote cooperation, creativity, and even impetus of the native popu- times. lations, principally the Aztecs. Also known as the Mexica (the Already in the sixteenth century, Fray Bartolomé de las term they used for themselves), these Mesoamerican people Casas (d. 1566), the Dominican bishop of Chiapas (Mexico), of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries inhabited was giving root to what would become the infamous “Black the central plateau around Lake Texcoco and the sacred me- Legend” in his account, The Destruction of the Indies (1524), of tropolis of Tenochtitlan, the site of present-day Mexico City. the Spanish invasion and mistreatment of the native peoples. As speakers of the Nahuatl tongue, they also carry the desig- Las Casas was rightly concerned to unmask the cruelty of the 1 © 2008 University of Notre Dame Press Lara-00.Intro 3/14/08 11:57 AM Page 2 Spanish landholders and their brutal exploitation of the native nation, and as the arm of Catholic orthodoxy in a world of Prot- population. He was particularly anxious to prove to the Holy estant heretics. In the mid-nineteenth century the American Roman Emperor and king of Spain, Charles V, and to the papacy, historian William Hickling Prescott wrote in a similar but less that Amerindians were human beings and not soulless beasts of religious vein about the glories of Spanish bravery in the face of burden; but Spain’s enemies would exploit his writing for their the barbarity of the uncivilized Aztec Indians. In 1843, after own use.3 The anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish English soon dis- spending two years in Mexico, he published his influential His- covered a treasure trove of propaganda in Las Casas’s critique, tory of the Conquest of Mexico, which was to become the standard translating it with the inflammatory title An account of the first textbook on the topic for more than a century. voyages and discoveries made by the Spaniards in America: containing In a way similar to its black counterpart, the White Leg- the most exact relation hitherto publish’d, of their unparallel’d cruel- end also credits all creative activity to the enterprise of the Eu- ties on the Indians, in the destruction of above forty millions of people: ropean clerics; a view that likewise cannot be sustained today. with the propositions offer’d to the King of Spain to prevent the further The White Legend is perhaps most identified with the French ruin of the West-Indies, by . an eye-witness of their cruelties; il- scholar Robert Ricard. In 1933 Ricard published his seminal lustrated with [wood]cuts.4 In addition to the text, what made the work, La conquête spirituelle du Mexique. It was groundbreaking narrative so potent and emotional as propaganda were Theodor and offered a wealth of primary and secondary sources for in- de Bry’s fanciful engravings of Spanish cruelty.5 For most of the vestigation. But Ricard was writing from a very Eurocentric sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the tone of in- perspective. His interest lay in Christian missionary technique,8 terpretation of the conquest of America was divided according as the English subtitle evidences: An Essay on the Apostolate and to national lines, with the English, Dutch, French, and Spanish the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain. defending their respective colonizing and civilizing of the “bar- On the subject of missiology Ricard excelled, but owing to this barians” while condemning the same activities in their political European focus he almost completely omitted the native voices enemies. Stephanie Wood has convincingly demonstrated that, extant in Nahuatl written documents and occasionally glimpsed while appearing to sympathize with native peoples as down- even in the mendicant chronicles themselves.9 Ricard also tended trodden masses, the proponents of the Black Legend actually to be somewhat naive in estimating the success of the evan- give them very little if any agency as intelligent human beings gelization process, taking the mendicants’ glowing evaluation or active players. Thus, she says, the legend and its modern ver- at face value while typifying the Amerindians in passive terms sions perpetuate the attribution of all significant activity to the and emphasizing what he saw as their quick acquiescence to conquerors and typify natives as passive or silent victims, a view the new religion.10 Ricard did not read Nahuatl or any other in- that cannot be sustained today.6 digenous language, and by 1933 only a few translations had ap- At the other end of this interpretive spectrum we might peared; hence, although noble in its conception and concerned speak of a “White Legend.”7 Certainly López de Gómara and for matters of religion and worship, his work is one-sided and the Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- incomplete.11 turies stand in this line of thought. Written almost exclusively Initial rejection of the Eurocentrism of Robert Ricard and by clerics actively involved in the christianization of native his followers, and a move toward a more nuanced “Gray Leg- peoples, the chronicles reveal an initial exuberance and opti- end,” came from Charles Gibson’s work in the 1960s on the sur- mism about bringing the “true faith” to the Amerindian gen- vival of Aztec culture under Spanish domination. He and others tiles; but they soon took a darker turn when it was realized that like him developed a hermeneutic of suspicion regarding the ob- the evangelization had mixed results and questionable suc- jectivity of the mendicant chroniclers. By comparing the friars’ cesses. If these histories of the early years were permitted to overly optimistic evaluation with the contrasting voices of native be published (quite a few were not), it was because they upheld documents and performance, they were able to detect evidence Spain’s nationalistic pride as a morally and culturally superior of occasional outright resistance or, more commonly, negotiated 2 © 2008 University of Notre Dame Press Lara-00.Intro 3/14/08 11:57 AM Page 3 accommodation between pre-Contact religious practices and they rarely if ever thought of themselves in terms of “van- later Christian practices (fig. I.1). Thomas Lucas simply calls quished” or “conquered.”14 Fig. I.1 this “a recognition of the inevitable dialectic of acculturation.”12 Colonial Mexico is fascinating and complex precisely be- The Lienzo de Tlaxcala, c. 1555, copy of the lost Historians and anthropologists like Miguel León-Portilla, cause mutually alien peoples were attempting to make sense of original. Plate 1: Opening David Carrasco, James Lockhart, William Taylor, Louise Burk- one another and of their new habitation of the same space. Both scene of the four princely hart, Serge Gruzinski, Stephanie Wood, and Jorge Klor de Alva sides of an admittedly unequal dialogue were bringing their houses of Tlaxcala and the representatives of the have given us a wealth of factual and interpretive information cultural filters, prejudices, and presuppositions through which Spanish Crown. Elements about native peoples and their religious expression at the time they scrutinized the new and strange other. Neither side was of European and native of the Contact. They have also attempted to look at the Euro- dispassionately objective; both had something to gain or to lose pictographic representation pean conquistadors and missionaries through the eyes of native in the transaction.15 They could not do otherwise. To expect have been combined. The scene in the lower center Americans—to the extent that that is possible.