Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (26 page)

Confraternities and Clerical Control over
Lay

Religious Practices

The church’s efforts both to foster and to restrain the
religious enthusiasms of its lay members in Spanish America are well
illustrated in the history of the
cofradía,
or confraternity, a lay
religious brotherhood known in Brazil as an
irmandad.
This institution
developed quickly into the most popular authorized vehicle by which ordinary
parishioners could participate in religious life after its introduction to
Latin America in the late 16th century. Comprised in many cases of both men and
women, cofradías were generally devoted to the veneration of a particular
saint, governed by elected officers, and supervised closely, at least in
theory, by both clerical and royal authorities. Each cofradía raised money from
its members for a variety of purposes, among them helping to pay for the
day-to-day expenses of celebrating the Mass, making ornamental or structural
improvements to parish churches, and celebrating an annual festival in honor of
its patron saint. The communal resources of the organization were often put to
more secular uses as well. For example, in many cases they constituted a sort
of mutual aid fund for members in distress.

Largely in the interest of producing more revenue to help
pay their expenses, cofradías often ended up acquiring a good deal of property
over time. By the mid-18th century, many of those operating in native villages
in the diocese of Guadalajara, Mexico, owned between 150 and 500 head of livestock,
along with some land on which to graze the animals. Such resources made these
organizations and their treasuries an attractive target for parish priests and
others in a supervisory position who were on the lookout for convenient sources
of extra funds. In 1675, for example, members of a native cofradía in the
village of Quezaltepeque, in present-day El Salvador, complained bitterly to
the bishop of Guatemala that their priest was working with local nonnative
residents to usurp control over the cofradía’s lands and livestock. The bishop
sided with the native cofradía in this case, although such victories were often
temporary. Enterprising members of the clergy employed a wide variety of
strategies in their efforts to derive benefits from the development of these
lay associations. Some priests were accused of encouraging their proliferation
simply to multiply the fees that could be collected from each cofradía
operating within the boundaries of the parishes they served.

Nonetheless, many parishioners appear to have been
intensely devoted to their cofradías. Since priests were often less zealous in
overseeing the religious than the financial affairs of these associations,
members frequently enjoyed a good deal of autonomy in their ritual practices.
By most accounts, native peoples, as well as Africans and their descendants,
were especially enthusiastic participants in the life of the cofradía. Many
scholars emphasize the likelihood that the organization provided these groups
with an ideal cover for the practice of non-Christian rituals. Church and royal
authorities certainly feared this possibility and ordered close supervision of
both native and black cofradías. The actual evidence for specific deviations
from Catholic doctrine was often thin or ambiguous, however, given that
departures from orthodoxy were unlikely to be widely advertised.

Whatever the motivation, participation by the non-European
majority of the population in the organization and maintenance of cofradías was
widespread. There were several hundred cofradías in existence in the largely
native Valley of Mexico alone by the end of the 17th century. A little farther
south, some indigenous villages in Guatemala had a dozen or more each by this
time, to the great consternation of Spanish officials. A century later, in
1789, the 419 churches under the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Guatemala
had a total of 1,982 such associations, an average of roughly 5 per church.

African and Native Confraternities

As might be expected in societies organized on the basis of
racial distinctions, cofradías devoted to a particular patron were often split
along ethnic or racial lines into two or more chapters. Thomas Gage, a renegade
English Dominican friar who served as a parish priest in Guatemala during the
1630s, reported that the cofradía of Our Lady of the Rosary in the village of
Mixco, located on the outskirts of the modern capital, had three separate
branches “belonging unto the
Indians,
the
Spaniards,
and the
Blackmores.
”
In larger urban centers like Lima or Salvador da Bahia, the existence of
numerous lay brotherhoods—15 alone for people of African ancestry in Lima in
1619—allowed for the emergence of more narrowly defined memberships. During the
early 17th century, when Portuguese merchants contracted by the Spanish crown
sharply boosted the numbers of enslaved Africans transported to both Brazil and
Spanish America, new arrivals contributed to the emergence of brotherhoods that
were directly identified with particular African regions or “nations” (ethnicities),
such as Angola or Mina. The emergence of these national brotherhoods may have
owed a good deal to priests’ efforts to counter the influence of councils the
slaves organized among themselves to oversee the affairs of each nation among
them, including the selection of a king and queen. Catholic brotherhoods’
adaptation of such practices reveals that processes of cultural transmission,
however powerful the church’s influence may have been, flowed in more than one
direction.

Although segregation among cofradías was not always as
rigidly maintained as the above examples suggest, official backing for racial
and ethnic distinctions had both symbolic and practical effects. For example,
certain patrons came to be tightly associated with specific groups, a development
that helped to shore up Iberian policies of social hierarchy. In Brazil, the
prestigious Third Order of St. Francis sought to exclude all nonwhites from its
ranks. Meanwhile, brotherhoods with memberships of African ancestry tended to
be dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, like similar organizations founded
earlier for Africans and their descendants in Portugal itself following the
Portuguese initiation of Atlantic slave trading during the 1440s.

The precise meaning of Our Lady of the Rosary to Africans
during this early era of the Atlantic slave trade is not very clear. The
transfer to Africans of the cult of the prayer beads is explained at least in
part by the simple fact that the Portuguese themselves were experiencing a
surge in enthusiasm for the Rosary and its association with the mother of
Christ during the 15th century and sought to impose that enthusiasm on the
peoples they were then enslaving. Three centuries later, recent arrivals to Brazil
from the Mina Coast, roughly speaking the southwestern portion of modern
Nigeria, are said to have associated the Roman Catholic Church’s Virgin of the
Rosary with the Yoruba divinity Yemanjá. Such blending of Christianity with
non-Christian African or native religious traditions, commonly known as
syncretism,
was a regular feature of religious practice throughout colonial Latin
America.

Our Lady of the Rosary was also important in Spanish
America as a patron for cofradías with memberships of African ancestry,
although other patrons eventually gained many adherents as well. Notable among
the other favorites were the Ethiopian Saint Iphigenia, Saint Nicholas of
Tolentino, and Saint Benedict of Palermo (ca. 1524–1589), himself reputed to
have been the Italian-born child of enslaved Africans. Benedict’s cult appeared
as early as 1602 in the Canary Islands, and just five years later in Venezuela.
While it took another two centuries for the Vatican to canonize Benedict
formally, his cult had soon spread among Africans and their descendants in the
Andes, Mexico, and even Central America, where at least five cofradías
dedicated to him were established in the territories of modern Guatemala and El
Salvador between 1645 and 1679.

The clergy, of course, exercised a good deal of influence
in the choice of patrons, and often for reasons other than those which
motivated parishioners. For the church’s representatives, careful selection of
an individual saint or other object of devotion for a cofradía could produce
substantial benefits beyond purely spiritual ones. In 18th-century central
Mexico, the primary cofradía in native villages was frequently dedicated to the
Holy Sacrament (i.e., the Eucharist) rather than to any individual saint with
whom a particular community identified. The explanation for this naming
practice appears to lie at least in part in the obligation of cofradías of this
advocation to underwrite the expenses of celebrating Mass, whose most vital
ritual was the transformation of bread and wine by means of the sacrament for
which the cofradía was named. Given the variety of innovative methods by which
clerical incomes were extracted from poor, rural communities, it is not hard to
imagine that priests made the establishment of this cofradía a priority in each
village they served as a means of reducing the likelihood they themselves might
have to assume any of the costs of celebrating Mass.

Confraternities and Popular Culture

Whatever the reasons for their founding, cofradías tended
to have a central place in the cultural life of the communities in which they
functioned. As already noted, on at least some occasions they provided a
vehicle for unauthorized practices, which might include the secret worship of
idols behind altars or the clandestine performance of outlawed dances. Among
the more public, Catholic-oriented forms of popular ritual undertaken by their
members were elaborate processions mounted for religious festivals. These
events, versions of which may still be seen in many places in Latin America today,
often involved lavish expenditures on such things as the construction of floats
on which to conduct images of a patron saint or other sacred items through the
streets. Nowhere were these processions more elaborate than in the fabulous
boomtowns of 18th-century Minas Gerais, Brazil. There, the initial flush of a
gold-and diamond-mining industry produced riches in such abundance that
brotherhoods made up of free people of African ancestry, and even slaves, were
able to contribute to the staging of sumptuous public displays of religious
devotion in communities like Vila Rica de Ouro Preto. An observer of a 1733
procession launched in celebration of the Eucharist in nearby Mariana reported
that members of the local black irmandad of the Rosary made their way through
the town robed in white silk and carrying images of their patron and other
favored saints bedecked in rich cloths and adorned with gold and diamonds.

Such processions might be as striking for the behavior of
the brotherhood members who took part in them as for the display of the resources
they had succeeded in acquiring and converting into items which signified their
religious devotion. Public self-flagellation as a form of penance for sins may
be one of the more alien and remarkable of these behaviors for many present-day
readers. Somber processions by crowds of penitents flogging themselves were a
common response to epidemics or natural disasters, like the earthquakes that
struck frequently along the geologically active zone that stretches from northern
Mexico to the southern tip of Chile. In explaining this practice as it occurred
among black cofradías in 17th-century Mexico, one historian has observed that
“Baroque Catholicism valued humility and emphasized infliction of suffering on
the self.”  To the extent that these values, embodied in a popular saint like
Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, were accepted by the marginalized majority,
they lent support to the prevailing, hierarchical social order. Ironically, the
agents of that order often viewed such activities on the part of nonwhite
brotherhoods with a good deal of suspicion, unsure either of their true meaning
or their propriety.

Late-Colonial Curbs on Confraternity
Activities

By the late-colonial era, royal authorities intent on
applying principles associated with Enlightenment thinking to the
reorganization of society began suppressing the sort of irrational excess that
expensive fiestas and rituals of self-flagellation were thought to represent.
In part this was to be accomplished by reducing the large number of obligatory
holy days on the calendar. By one estimate, there had been 95 of these,
including Sundays, during the 16th century, even though employers often ignored
them, as indicated in the discussion of working conditions on Brazilian sugar
plantations in an earlier chapter. The church, nonetheless, had always fiercely
defended the sanctity of these holidays against efforts to increase the number
of legitimate working days, whether out of genuine concern for parishioners’
souls or the health of its own revenue base, given that priests collected fees
for their role in fiestas.

But late-colonial reformers, seeking above all to enhance
economic productivity, set out both to rein in clerical independence and to
eliminate the ills associated with fiesta days. On top of the obligatory
elements of Catholic ritual, fiestas usually involved some combination of heavy
alcohol consumption, dancing to exhaustion, gambling, and fireworks. Much to
the chagrin of officials, such celebrations were extremely popular, at least in
part because they provided a welcome break from daily routine. Efforts to
interfere with them could spark serious protest. Between 1774 and 1782, the
native residents of the village of Zapotlan El Grande, Guadalajara, rioted four
times in response to their priest’s largely unsuccessful attempts to eliminate,
or at least tone down, various allegedly excessive aspects of celebrations for
Holy Week and other religious holidays. Among the cited excesses was the
construction by drunken work parties of lavish and allegedly wasteful flowered
arches for fiesta days, a custom with roots in the ceremonial life of the
Mexica and other Nahua peoples of pre-colonial central Mexico. Even worse was
the
mojiganga,
a masked and evidently non-Christian ritual in which men
dressed as bulls threatened, injured, and sometimes, or so the priest said,
killed each other.