Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (27 page)

At the same time, some of the behaviors that now offended
the authorities were also seen less favorably by previously marginalized groups
whose members were striving for greater social respectability.
Self-flagellation, for example, appears to have been deemphasized in Mexico’s
black cofradías during the 18th century, as free and often mixed-race, or
mulato,
descendants of enslaved African migrants worked to shed the marginal social
status experienced by their ancestors, a task made easier by the marked decline
locally in slavery’s economic importance. This accommodation to Spanish
colonial social norms evidently extended to gender relations as well. Whereas
cofradías with memberships of African ancestry had been receptive to female
leadership during the 17th century, an attitude possibly derived from African
antecedents, such was no longer the case in the 18th century. This shift is
especially striking in light of indications that women of African ancestry,
along with their native counterparts, had long been more active participants in
the day-to-day affairs of cofradías than Spanish women. Just south of Mexico,
in early 17th-century Santiago de Guatemala, a number of free black women had
left wills bequeathing a portion of their meager estates to cofradías in which
they claimed membership and, in at least one case, a leadership role.

The supposedly enlightened attack on the ills associated with
cofradías was in many ways an attack on the larger, religion-infused popular
culture of which these organizations were an integral part. Indeed, dividing
that culture neatly into religious and secular categories makes little sense
for much of the colonial era, especially since the division itself is largely a
legacy of Enlightenment-era thought. A lavish spectacle in celebration of a
saint’s day, attended by heavy bouts of drinking, was a leading source of
entertainment for people from all levels of society in colonial Latin America,
whether in a small village or a major urban center. The religious and non-religious
aspects of such an event are difficult to distinguish, as neither theatrical
performance nor the use of alcohol were entirely devoid of religious
significance. In fact, church officials tried hard to restrict the theater to
employment as a form of Christian education while attempting at the same time
to stamp out native peoples’ pre-colonial understandings of alcohol’s spiritual
attributes. The actions of these officials presaged those carried out later by
18th-century reformers of popular culture who saw themselves as representative
of Enlightenment-era progress.

DRINKING, PLAYS, AND OTHER
ASPECTS OF POPULAR CULTURE

Alcohol and Its Many Uses

Drunkenness may appear to most present-day readers as a
condition that ought to fall squarely into a discussion of secular popular
culture. Yet for many native peoples of the pre-1492 Americas, the use of
alcoholic beverages, not to mention substances like peyote in Mexico or the
coca leaf in the Andes, had clear religious overtones. Of course, wine was a
fundamental element in the central religious ritual of Iberian Catholics, the
Mass, but not for its virtues as an intoxicant. By contrast, ritual drunkenness
as a means of communing with the spirit world was evidently a feature of
fertility ceremonies and other important events on the religious calendar of
many pre-colonial societies in the Americas. Among the Mexica and other Nahua
peoples of central Mexico, participation in these rites was often restricted by
law to the nobility, with severe penalties mandated for unauthorized
consumption of intoxicating beverages by anyone, whether noble or commoner.
Nevertheless, in many areas, community-wide ritual drinking did take place,
although again with the emphasis on inebriation as a collective, ceremonial
act. The beverage at the center of these celebrations was
pulque,
a
cloudy, weakly fermented liquid derived from the
maguey
cactus and the
major source of intoxication in Mexico before the Spanish arrival. Whether
consumed or sprinkled on a fire as an offering to the gods, it seems to have
held near-sacred status in pre-colonial societies, as did the Andean corn beer
to which Spaniards gave the Taíno name
chicha.

The consumption of alcohol by natives, especially
commoners, appears to have increased dramatically under colonial rule.
Nevertheless, patterns of collective drinking continued in many ways to reflect
an understanding of its social role that was at odds with that held by
Iberians. For the latter, wine was an essential complement to food at mealtimes
in addition to being indispensable for the celebration of the Catholic Mass,
not to mention being in every way a superior product to pulque or chicha, just
as supposedly civilized wheat bread and olive oil were in comparison with the
despised Mesoamerican diet of corn, beans, and squash or the potato-based
Andean cuisine. Beyond these status considerations, drinking to the point of
losing control over one’s senses was considered in any circumstance to be a
sign of weakness or excess, and therefore uncivilized by definition. “God
created wine for the enjoyment of mankind, not for drunkenness,” thundered one
friar living in 17th-century Mexico City, expressing a sentiment common enough
to make “drunkard” a highly offensive insult among his fellow Spaniards there. 
Even other Europeans were alleged to lack proper self-control in their drinking
habits, let alone the local native peoples whose patterns of alcohol use were
viewed as nothing short of barbaric by their alien rulers.

Any consideration of inebriation as a fundamental aspect of
spiritual life was entirely unacceptable, not to say incomprehensible, to a
Catholic priest watching raucous native celebrations of a saint’s day. For many
such priests, the collective drunkenness of native parishioners only served as
further proof of their irredeemably sinful natures. The misinterpretation of
festive drinking by ethnocentric Europeans does not, however, disguise the fact
that a good deal of alcohol consumption occurred among native peoples for
reasons apparently unrelated to any formal ritual practice and more probably
reflecting the ills of conquest. One disapproving cleric reported in the late
17th century that in the native villages surrounding the Valley of Mexico’s
sanctuary of Churubusco, “hundreds of men are continually drunk.”  The social
ills produced by the increase in non-festive alcohol use were often profound,
even if Spanish analysis of those ills reflected the typical attitudes of
ruling elites toward the ruled.

Producing and Consuming Alcohol

The factors contributing most heavily to behavior that
Spaniards characterized as barbaric included the establishment, with royal
support, of an official network of roadside taverns. In addition to the native
pulque, these establishments served wine and distilled liquors like brandy, all
of them previously unknown to Mexico’s native peoples. Revenue-starved royal
officials also eagerly encouraged the expansion of alcohol production, finding
it a reliable source of taxation with which to fund public works projects. Nor
was there a shortage of willing producers among the Spanish population; some of
the wealthiest families in Mexico held substantial investments in the
production of pulque, a drink they generally professed to despise as Indian and
therefore barbaric. As of the 1650s, this beverage was available for
consumption in some 212
pulquerías
in the capital alone.

By the late colonial era, many Mexican villages had a dozen
or more drinking establishments. In general, only one or two were true taverns
with the rest consisting of little more than private doorways from which a
small-scale entrepreneur, in most cases a woman and frequently a widow,
dispensed pulque to passersby from a jug in return for cash or payment in kind.
At the same time, the collective, ceremonial aspects of pulque consumption had
not been entirely forgotten by native peoples, especially in rural areas. Pre-colonial
prohibitions on solitary drinking or the participation of women and children in
ritual drunkenness on festival days continued to inform community norms
regarding the proper social uses of alcohol, if not necessarily actual
behavior.

In Mexico City, by contrast, the alleged excesses of urban
commoners so alarmed Enlightenment-era bureaucrats that they introduced a
series of regulations aimed at eliminating pulquerías altogether. These
establishments, encouraged in earlier times, now came to be viewed by the
authorities primarily as potential incubators of rebellion rather than reliable
generators of revenue. Only 35 were left in existence by 1793, at least
officially. The violence often associated with such establishments was always
of most concern to the colonial elite when it occurred in an important urban
center, whether Mexico City or faraway Buenos Aires, an up-and-coming port city
in the late 18th century where common people gathered in neighborhood shops
known as
pulperías
to drink cheap brandy and socialize. Violence aside,
from the perspective of the urban poor there were few other places in which to
find respite from a daily struggle for survival that regularly brought them
grief at the hands of the same social superiors who were so intent on
restricting their pleasures for their own good.

Power and the Theater

Aside from alcohol consumption, other diversions from the
mundane aspects of colonial life did exist, notably the theater in its various
manifestations. The power of theatrical performance, whether understood in a
narrow, formal sense or broadly enough to encompass cofradía processions and
similar popular activities, was such that control over it was considered vital
by both religious and royal authorities. Indeed, colonial theater originated at
least partially in the presentation of religious plays by 16th-century clerics
as a fundamental element in their efforts to Christianize the native peoples of
the Americas. Like painting, sculpture, and music in churches, such plays were
employed as a means of educating the targets of conversion in key details of the
new faith that they were expected to accept.

Native Peoples and Colonial Theater

The inhabitants of what we refer to as the Aztec and Inca
empires already had their own traditions of grand public spectacles when
Spaniards arrived. These traditions may have made them especially receptive to
the new Christian theater, although probably as much for its value as
entertainment as for the intended religious instruction. Eventually, saint’s
day festivals and other Catholic celebrations tended to feature native actors
presenting their own versions of theatrical work. A performance still put on in
places like Guatemala, with its large Maya population, is a stylized rendition
of the conquest titled
moros y cristianos
and set ostensibly in the
pre-1492 Iberian Peninsula with its conflict between Moors and Christians.
Another theatrical practice has persisted in Peru, a ritual conflict called
tinku,
rooted in pre-colonial fertility rites as well as historical conflict both
within and between local native communities. Tinku generally took place during
the days immediately preceding Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent and
often involved actual violence and even death. The mix of imported and native
elements in shaping such theatrical practices is not easy to judge; indeed,
their meaning is rarely entirely obvious to observers or even, perhaps, many of
the participants. And if Catholicism clearly influenced their development, the
impact was not necessarily the one intended by the church.

Processions and Playhouses

The introduction of Christian-themed plays by friars in
early colonial Spanish America was followed quite quickly by the emergence of a
more secular European variant of theatrical performance, despite strong
reservations on the part of many clerics and the imposition of strict
censorship by the Inquisition after 1574. This development owed a good deal to
the desire of Spanish immigrants to reproduce the rich theatrical tradition of
their homeland, just entering what would come to be known as its golden age. Public
plays were a popular feature of the grand civic festivals mounted on the
arrival of a new viceroy, for example, when the urban masses thronged the
streets to enjoy grand processions and a series of popular entertainments.
Prominent among the latter was the
mascarada,
a lively parade through
the streets by masked performers representing well-known personages from the
realms of myth or history, as well as characters from popular literary works.
In 1621, one such event in Mexico City featured the leading figures from
Don
Quixote,
Miguel de Cervantes’s great 1605 novel. Thus were crowds made up
largely, no doubt, of illiterate individuals introduced to Sancho Panza and
other characters from a book published not long before on the other side of the
ocean, only to make the story their own in ways we can only guess at.

Mascaradas focusing on local themes often presented
didactic interpretations of Mexican history and culture. According to the
observations of one of Mexico’s leading 17th-century scholars, Carlos de
Sigüenza y Góngora, a 1680 mascarada in the town of Querétaro unfolded in four
distinct sections that added up to a version of the Spanish conquest as
Mexico’s salvation. First came “a disorganized band of wild Chichimeca Indians
who swarmed about the thoroughfares garbed in the very minimum that decency
allows,” which was followed by an evidently more disciplined, and properly
attired, creole militia unit. The third section involved a procession of actors
representing pre-colonial Aztec and other native monarchs, who prepared the way
for the arrival of a figure meant to be Charles V, Holy Roman emperor and king
of Spain when Cortés conquered Tenochtitlán. Last came a float carrying an
image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose reported appearance to a native man
named Juan Diego in 1531 had recently begun to be celebrated widely by Mexican
creoles after the story’s publication in the 1640s. The accompaniment of the
float by “a lovely child garbed in the native raiment of the Indians” and
kneeling at the foot of the Virgin’s throne capped off a performance that was
clearly intended to emphasize the triumph of both the church and the Spanish
crown over indigenous Mexico.