Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (28 page)

A more exclusive variety of theatrical performance was the
formal play presented in an enclosed space designed for that purpose. Members
of the colonial elite had been accustomed to taking in such entertainment in
the privacy of the vice-regal palace or a similar venue since the early
colonial era. By the late 16th century, playhouses known as
corrales,
privately
owned and usually very basic in their amenities, were offering such
performances to the wider public in Mexico City as well. The survival of these
private playhouses was always precarious, however, as the crown had granted a
formal monopoly on this type of performance to an officially licensed theater
that began operating in the city’s Royal Indian Hospital during the 1560s. A
similar, officially sanctioned theater opened in Lima in 1601, in the Royal
Hospital of San Andrés.

Audience Expectations and Public Morality

Audience expectations of the theater appear to have varied
greatly by social condition, especially in public circumstances where people
from more than one level of society were thrown together. In the late 18th
century, elite patrons of Mexico City’s New Coliseum, opened in 1753 as the
last in a series of buildings constructed to house the performances allowed
under the Royal Indian Hospital’s license, complained frequently about the
boisterous behavior exhibited by audience members from the city’s poor, mostly
casta
majority. The latter, congregated in the cheap seats, talked and ate during
performances, called out to the actors, and loudly applauded a variety of
between-acts dances and other short entertainments that were often criticized
instead by the authorities and the “better” sort of patron as lewd or otherwise
morally suspect. After the play was finished, the actors, poorly paid for the
most part, often accompanied the lower-class audience members to a nearby alley
where the festivities were renewed through the presentation of crowd-pleasing
puppet shows. These gatherings provided a little more income for members of the
performing classes and an even less restrained ambience for audiences
uninterested in the supposedly more refined pleasures of the upper classes.

Like 16th-century missionaries, appalled advocates of
18th-century Enlightenment values sought to transform the theater into a form
of moral education for the common people. The emphasis of that education was
shifted somewhat, however, from a focus on religious doctrine to principles
associated by their advocates with reason and order. To this effect, New Spain’s
Theater Regulations of 1786, implemented by one noted proponent of these
principles, Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez,
strengthened
existing forms of censorship,
sharply restricted the apparel and behavior that actresses in particular could
exhibit on the stage, and prescribed a standardized set of penalties (up to and
including eight days’ imprisonment!) for audience members found guilty of
creating “disorder.” Gálvez also had his perspective on the theater’s purpose
inscribed on the curtain of the New Coliseum, for the benefit of all audience
members. It ran as follows:

Drama is my name

and my duty is to correct
mankind

in the exercise of my profession

friend of virtue, enemy of vice.

As in the crackdown on the social ills associated with
religious festivals and pulquerías, the marginalized segments of society bore
the brunt of theater reforms intended to improve them. Women, for example, had
been gradually increasing their participation in the theatrical world during
the 17th and early 18th centuries, despite church disapproval, to the extent
that several were able to assume posts as directors in New Spain. But the last
of them, María Ordóñez, was eventually locked up for years in a series of
casas
de recogimiento,
institutions in which women were sequestered for various
reasons including “moral lapses.” When Ordóñez finally won release in 1794, it
was only with the warning that the slightest misstep in conduct would result in
her immediate reincarceration.

DEATH, DYING, AND CULTURAL CONFLICT

The contest between colonial authorities, whether religious
or secular, and colonial subjects to define the nature and parameters of daily
cultural practice culminated in the rituals associated with the end of life.
For its part, the church had a key stake in the issue, given its fundamental
concern with determining the manner in which all significant life passages were
observed. As with two other important transitions, birth and marriage, a Roman Catholic
priest was to administer a sacrament—in this case extreme unction, also known
as the last rites—to all individuals experiencing the transition. The ceremony
involved anointment of the dying person’s sensory organs with holy oil,
accompanied by petitions offered on his or her behalf, and was intended as a
last cleansing of sins in preparation for final judgment in the afterlife. Once
death had taken place, a funeral mass and burial of the corpse, again in
accordance with the church’s precisely scripted rituals, was to follow shortly.

This 18th-century Catholic
death-bed manuscript from Mexico reminds the churchgoer that a sinner cannot
enter heaven. Part of the inscription tells us that the dying man knows he has
sinned and does not know if he is pardoned. “I want to begin to do what I wish
I had done,” he says. But it may be too late; notice the devil waiting under
the bed for his prey.

As we have already seen, however, unorthodox practices
frequently escaped the efforts of the authorities to control them, sparking
both repression of and accommodation to the popular will on the part of ruling
sectors interested in maintaining social control as best as they could.
Nowhere, perhaps, was this tension more evident than in the beliefs and
practices associated with death and dying. All societies have developed
powerful ideas about proper disposal of the dead, and most have also assumed
the existence of an afterlife and the need to mediate the relationship between
the living and the dead in one way or another. The native societies encountered
by the Iberians in the New World were no exception, nor were the African ones
from which involuntary migrants were forcibly transported to the Americas. The
Spanish and Portuguese themselves, especially the majority of commoners, held
on to and acted on many notions regarding the dead and the spirit world that
were distinctly at odds with Christian doctrine. Sometimes the church was able
to suppress such notions, but it was forced to tolerate others more or less openly,
seeing them as hopelessly ineradicable remnants of what it characterized as
pagan superstition.

Popular Celebrations of the Dead

The present-day Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead
provides one example of the persistence in Latin America of rituals surrounding
death and dying that do not conform to the beliefs the church first began
imposing five centuries ago. A crucial aspect of the celebration involves treks
to the graves of relatives in local cemeteries by families laden with food and
drink to be shared with the deceased. The ritual takes place as the Christian
calendar is marking All Saints’ Day and then All Souls’ Day on November 1–2, a
clear sign of the church’s influence. Nevertheless, many of its primary
elements reflect non-Christian understandings of communion with the spirit
world.

During the colonial era, Mexican priests regularly took
note of the beliefs and practices that continue to inform the Day of the Dead
festival, criticizing them but also interpreting them in a manner that made
them appear compatible with Christianity, a clear sign of resignation in the
face of traditions too strong to be eliminated. The long-standing appeal of All
Souls’ Day to Mexico’s native peoples is indicated in a 1766 guide for priests
in the diocese of Puebla. The guide described the preparations made by local
Indians as the holiday approached: sweeping the streets and patios of their
houses and setting out fruit and bread for the return of deceased relatives.
Other unorthodox rituals reported in the guide included the practice of leaving
the clothing of deceased individuals at the place of death for a week and
burying corpses with sandals. Indeed, the list of items buried with a dead
relative might include provisions, money, and even farm implements. While the
handbook expressed disapproval of such acts, the priests who read it were
encouraged not to view them as fundamentally opposed to the church’s teachings,
in other words not to concern themselves too greatly with trying to eliminate
them.

Rituals of a similar nature were reportedly practiced by
people of African origins in Brazil. A bishop visiting Minas Gerais in 1726
described members of the local enslaved population “singing and playing
instruments for their dead” and “getting together in stores where they bought
various food and drinks, which after they ate they threw into the grave.”  Once
again, practices that proved impossible to root out were accommodated by the
church, evident in the fact that some Catholic brotherhoods of the Rosary in
Brazil continue to incorporate drumming and songs associated with the rituals
of enslaved Africans into burial rites for deceased members. There were,
nevertheless, distinct limits to the church’s strategy of tolerance, as made
clear in the earlier discussion of the campaign to eradicate idolatry in the
Andes. Church authorities viewed late-colonial reports that native peoples in a
few central Mexican villages were throwing their dead down ravines to be
devoured by wild animals as nothing other than proof of their incorrigibly evil
natures, not to mention the devil’s ongoing efforts to rob the church of the
souls its approved rituals were meant to save.

Royal officials, meanwhile, were sometimes alarmed even by
the sort of attention paid by the public to properly Catholic observances of
death and burial. The Spanish crown issued decrees against extravagance in the
purchase of mourning clothes, considered by many Spaniards to be an essential
component of their wardrobe and an important gauge of status. The same crown
was disturbed by reports of excessive popular enthusiasm for the processions
and other rituals that attended a corpse as it was being conducted to its final
resting place; therefore, the crown attempted to ban public displays of
mourning unless the social status of the deceased individual was sufficiently
grand as to warrant it. As with many other aspects of popular culture, the
attitudes of the authorities toward the ritualized behaviors surrounding
processes of death and dying seem to have been shaped primarily by the
implications of those behaviors for the maintenance of the prevailing colonial
order.

An
1811 engraving of a funeral rite attributed to one of the Tupi-Guaraní peoples
living along the Orinoco River in the Amazon basin. Some indigenous people
practiced rites in which the flesh was removed from the skeleton and the bones
were used for ritual ornaments.

CONCLUSION

In colonial Latin America, both religious and royal
authorities believed they had not only the right but the duty to legislate
morality and restrain what they viewed as the excesses of a flourishing popular
culture. Somewhat ironically, the church at the same time sponsored some of the
most important vehicles for those alleged excesses, such as the cofradía. This
seeming contradiction was arguably the logical consequence of the church’s
efforts to control all forms of cultural expression. Pushed to respond to the
spiritual or other enthusiasms of an exploited and potentially restive
majority, it sought both to encourage those enthusiasms and to contain them
within acceptable boundaries.

At the same time, a major obstacle to the successful
transfer of a narrowly Iberian Catholic cultural model to the Americas was the
diversity of the populations over which the Spanish and Portuguese ruled. It is
not surprising that colonial authorities were unable to impose cultural
uniformity with anything approaching complete success on societies that forced
together peoples of widely varying indigenous, European, and African
backgrounds. The yawning social and economic gap between a tiny elite of
wealthy
peninsulares
and creoles, on the one hand, and a poor, largely
non-European majority, on the other, also contributed to the persistence of
distinctive cultural practices among different sectors of the population. Each
of those sectors experienced the profound impact of Iberian Catholic rule in
its own way. The next chapter shifts the angle from which to view the
significance of that form of rule for colonial daily life, bringing into focus Spanish
and Portuguese administrative strategies in the Americas and popular responses
to those strategies, both peaceful and violent.

7 - GOVERNMENT, POLITICAL LIFE,
AND REBELLION

INTRODUCTION

The
imposition of forced labor systems, as well as alien religious and cultural
norms, on native peoples and unwilling African migrants in the Americas was
accomplished under the umbrella of a royal administrative structure created to
manifest the will of the king in the actions of even the most petty local official.
Laws rapidly proliferated; when the Spanish crown collected the extensive and
sometimes contradictory legislation it had emitted over nearly two centuries in
a single publication in 1681, the resulting
Recopilación de leyes de los
reynos de las Indias
ran to several thousand regulations. But the
relationship between law and daily life was not one-to-one in either Spanish
America or Brazil. Royal officials often protected their own vested interests
by expressing what they claimed was the king’s will in ways that were markedly
at odds with the evident intent of the royal decree. Such legal flexibility
helps to explain the fact that colonial rule persisted for three long centuries
in Latin America. Indeed, overt resistance rarely threatened the colonial system
during most of this period, not because conflict was absent but because it was
usually contained by some combination of official willingness to accommodate
popular grievances and the tendency of marginalized people to “work the system”
to their “minimum disadvantage” more or less peacefully, in the formulation of one
eminent historian.  Nonetheless, the threat of violence on the part of both
rulers and ruled was never entirely absent. This chapter examines colonial rule
and popular responses to it, up to and including armed revolt and repression.