Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (25 page)

A key consequence of the church’s acquisition of great
wealth was that it came to operate in effect as the primary lender in colonial
society in the absence of a modern banking system. Carefully skirting its own
proscriptions on the practice of usury, it circulated its liquid assets by
means of creative financial instruments like the
censo al quitar,
which
functioned like a modern property mortgage while avoiding the language of debt
and interest. Representatives of the institution would “purchase” an annual
income from a local notable, with that income conveniently equaling five
percent of a lump sum transferred by the church to the “seller,” who then
guaranteed the income (we would say interest payment) with land or other pieces
of property. The vast resources of the church, both financial and spiritual,
also made it the most important patron of the fine arts in colonial society. In
fact, a good portion of the wealth it collected was tied up more or less
permanently in the fabulous baroque structures that came to dominate urban
landscapes throughout Latin America, whose construction and ornamentation
occupied all manner of artisans, painters, and sculptors, including many of
racially mixed or non-European origins. Village churches, if modest by
comparison with their urban counterparts, often represented an even greater
investment of local resources on a per capita basis.

Church Power and Its Limits

Wealthy and powerful as it was, the church was not quite as
omnipotent as is sometimes thought. Even its control over religious practices
varied widely according to time, place, and social group, despite the desire of
its representatives to extend their reach into as many corners of daily life as
possible. At the height of its power, the mighty Inquisition lacked all
jurisdiction over the native population of the Americas and often concerned
itself less with uncovering witchcraft or other suspect ritual practices among
the non-indigenous lower classes than with exposing
Judaizers,
or Jews
masquerading as Christians, among the small colonial elite. Those unlucky
enough to be targeted by the Inquisition suffered greatly, as when it
terrorized small communities of Portuguese merchants who were in many cases “New
Christian” descendants of
conversos:
individuals who had converted, at
least publicly, from Judaism to Catholicism to avoid persecution and,
ultimately, expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. The allegedly guilty parties
were identified by means of a lengthy, bureaucratic procedure that involved
intensive interrogation and, where necessary, torture. They were then
humiliated publicly in an
auto-da-fé,
a highly ritualized, penitential
ceremony that culminated in the
relaxation,
or transferal, of the worst
sinners to royal authorities for burning at the stake. Eleven convicted
participants in a “Great Jewish Conspiracy” suffered the latter fate in Lima in
1639 at the end of a 4-year investigation that may have had as much to do with
punishing affluent Portuguese outsiders for their wealth as correcting heresy.
A similar campaign in Mexico City 10 years later resulted in 13 more
executions.

Such spectacular events were in fact relatively rare in
colonial Latin America. Death sentences for heresy or witchcraft were far more
common in Europe. In any case, both the power and the weaknesses of the church
are best revealed in its day-to-day efforts to sustain a monopoly on religious
as well as broader cultural practices through such means as the Mass,
confession, and the sponsorship of lay organizations and religious
fiestas.
The
impact of these efforts was profound, although the church never entirely
eliminated competition either from non-Christian religious traditions or from
some of the more secular aspects of Iberian culture and in some cases found it
easiest to accommodate them. A new challenge to the church’s influence emerged
during the later 18th century, when royal authorities seeking to curb clerical
independence enacted a series of reforms aimed at strengthening the central
authority of the crown through the application of Enlightenment principles of
rational, secular governance. In the meantime, though, the institution and its
representatives loomed large over daily life throughout a region that remains
even now, at least nominally, the world’s most staunchly Catholic one.

RELIGIOUS LIFE

Nuns, Priests, and Racial Hierarchy

In 1679, Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, born some eight
decades earlier into a family of West Africa’s Bran people, died in a convent
of Discalced (barefoot) Carmelite nuns in Puebla, near Mexico City. Brought to
New Spain aboard a slave ship as a child, and transferred soon after to the
convent by her original owner, Juana had served the Carmelite nuns for some 68
years by the time of her death. According to one historian, during this lengthy
period of service Juana had acquired such a reputation for saintly humility
that news of her demise brought crowds of local residents to the convent’s door
to beg for whatever modest objects had been hers to use during her long life.
The deceased’s popularity was broad enough, moreover, to impel the city’s
leading officials to spare no expense in preparing for and staging a lavish
public ceremony to commemorate her passing. Nor was Juana’s fame a merely local
phenomenon. Several years earlier, no less an eminence than the Marquesa de
Mancera, wife of New Spain’s viceroy at the time, had visited the convent
looking to meet the virtuous black woman whose embodiment of Christian virtue
had won such wide acclaim.

This somewhat unexpected story of an African-born popular
saint in Mexico provides an entry point for elaborating on the church’s place
in colonial Latin American society. First, we should note that despite her
great fame as an exemplary Christian, Juana Esperanza de San Alberto herself
was evidently not granted permission to profess as a nun until she fell mortally
ill. The church, in other words, like the larger society within which it
operated, reflected Iberian efforts to maintain a racial hierarchy in the New
World. In the old Inca capital of Cuzco, Peru, not even the wealthy
mestiza
descendants
of Spanish conquerors or the daughters of the native Andean nobility escaped
treatment as second-class residents in local convents. Indeed, a distinction
was developed between higher-status nuns of the black veil and lower-status
nuns of the white veil in part to exclude women of supposedly inferior ancestry
from full participation in the life of those institutions.

Naturally, the slaves, native commoners, and poor free
people of mixed ancestry who constituted the majority of the colonial
population were even less welcome in the life of the religious professions,
unless, like Juana, they entered that life in the service of more acceptable
persons. In the late 18th century, nearly 300 years after the Spanish arrival,
Indians made up no more than 5 percent of parish priests in central Mexico, and
fewer still were of known mixed ancestry. This situation persisted in the face
of an explicit 1771 recommendation by a council of Mexican bishops that
one-third of seminary students in the region be drawn from either the native or
mestizo
populations, which together represented the vast majority of
Mexico’s inhabitants. Given that the bishops themselves continued regularly to
characterize members of these groups as inferior even after making the
recommendation to expand their numbers in the priesthood, it is no surprise
that long-standing barriers to their participation were slow to fall.

The people who came to dominate the religious professions
in colonial Latin America were members of the creole minority, supplemented by
a steady if proportionally decreasing stream of clerics coming from the Iberian
Peninsula or other parts of Europe. Thus the church was represented officially
to a largely non-European membership in the Americas by priests, friars, and
nuns who were mostly European in ancestry, if not birth. Even among creoles it
was the wealthier and better-educated urban families who were most able to send
their sons or daughters into the religious life, and certainly into its higher
ranks. These individuals were often sustained comfortably in their chosen
vocation with the support of family resources that might be used, for example,
to establish an endowed chaplaincy to be filled by a son who had been
designated for the priesthood. More striking were the lavish “dowries,” often
including servants and slaves, which accompanied young creole women entering
prestigious convents like Cuzco’s Santa Clara as “brides of Christ.” These
offerings of wealth secured a daughter’s place among the convent elite at the
very moment she was taking a solemn vow of poverty, not to mention access on
favorable terms to the institution’s credit services. To be sure, there were
humble parish priests scraping together a paltry living under trying
circumstances in remote and isolated rural communities, including some who won
the affection of their parishioners by regularly foregoing the customary fees
levied on everything from baptisms to masses for the dead. Even when protecting
his charges from outside impositions, however, the church’s local
representative was almost always both better off and more European in origin
than the vast majority of his flock.

A woman of Juana Esperanza de San Alberto’s humble origins,
already restricted by her gender, could in most cases hope for nothing better
than incorporation into convent life as a
donada,
a lay sister who spent
much of her time performing the manual labor that sustained the day-to-day
existence of her superiors. Alternatively, she might enter a
beaterio,
an
institution housing a community of laywomen (
beatas)
who were only
permitted to take informal religious vows. Even if she won accolades for
demonstrating one of the qualities most highly valued in the religious life,
like the 17th-century mystic Ursula de Jesús, a Lima-based donada of African
origins, she was not usually eligible for the sort of earthly reward to which
higher-born individuals might aspire. After all, the humility demonstrated by
Juana Esperanza de San Alberto earned the praise of her social superiors
precisely because it set a good example for those people from her own
background who were less willing than she was to accept what the authorities
viewed as their proper place in society. If anything, lives like Juana’s were
celebrated as
exceptions
to the moral weakness alleged to be natural in
people of non-European, particularly African, ancestry. Moreover, credit for
these exceptional lives was not to be found in an examination of the character
of the individuals who lived them. When José Gómez de la Parra, a Puebla
cleric, published a history of the convent in which Juana had lived her life in
1703, he celebrated her remarkable virtue only to attribute it entirely to the
beneficent Christian influence exercised on her by the nuns she had served
nearly her entire life.

Religious Deviance and Punishment

For us, there are other conclusions to be drawn from
Juana’s story, and not only its usefulness as an illustration of the
hierarchical nature of Catholicism as practiced in colonial Latin America.
Buried in the account of her life and death are hints of the existence of
popular forms of religious practice that may not have adhered very closely to
the narrow orthodoxies of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. The report
of a scramble at the convent door for her effects on news of her demise suggests
a desire on the part of local people to acquire objects they viewed as sacred,
either as souvenirs or to conduct unapproved rituals. The latter sort of
activity, especially if it deviated enough from Christian practices to be
labeled witchcraft, was associated most closely with women of either African or
native origins. Given that native women were exempt from the Inquisition’s
jurisdiction, the tribunal particularly targeted black and
mulata
women
for corrective measures, which might include whipping and imprisonment. But
they were hardly the only ones to engage in forms of spirituality that were
officially frowned upon. Even members of the Spanish elite consulted their
Indian servants and African slaves for assistance with incantations or potions
when they wished, for example, to obtain a favorable outcome in the realm of
love.

Vexing as such practices were to the religious authorities,
the persistence of what the church characterized as idolatrous activities in
Indian communities was perhaps even more frustrating. While off-limits to the
Inquisition owing to the church’s conception of native peoples as naive and
childlike, such behavior had been targeted for elimination by crusading priests
and friars since the earliest years of the colonial era. An extended if never
wholly successful campaign focused on ending indigenous Andean peoples’
veneration of
huacas:
stones or other natural objects held to be sacred.
Between 1640 and 1750, a series of investigations of idolatry were carried out
in the archdiocese of Lima, resulting in “processions of shame,” public
floggings, and similar punishments for the alleged sorcerers and witches whom
investigators claimed to have identified in native communities. Church
authorities also attempted to neutralize the power that Andeans associated with
the natural world by smashing sacred stones, erecting crosses in places that
were considered to be especially holy, and otherwise endeavoring to erase the
presence of non-Christian symbolism from the landscape. Popular religious enthusiasm,
in other words, was always seen as a grave threat to the church when directed
to unapproved ends. Clerics, therefore, were given the crucial task of
channeling such enthusiasm into organizations and activities under the church’s
direct control.