Biography of a Mexican crucifix : lived religion and local faith from the conquest to the present

329 Pages·2010·3.81 MB·English

by  Hughes, Jennifer Scheper

B iography of a Mexican
Crucifi x
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B iography of a
Mexican Crucifi x
L ived Religion and Local Faith from the
Conquest to the Present
J E NNIFER SC HEPER H U GHES

2010
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L ibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
H ughes, Jennifer Scheper.
B iography of a Mexican crucifi x : lived religion and local faith
from the conquest to the present / Jennifer Scheper Hughes.
p. cm.
I ncludes bibliographical references and index.
I SBN 978-0-19-536706-5; 978-0-19-536707-2 (pbk.)
1 . Mexico—Church history. 2. Catholic Church—Mexico—
History. 3. Mexico—Religious life and customs—History.
4. Crosses—Mexico—Morelos (State). 5. Jesus Christ—Crucifi xion.
I.Title.
B X1428.3.H84 2010
2 82′ . 72—dc22 2009012196
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
P rinted in the United States of America
o n acid-free paper
T o You, Señor, as promised,
a nd to my own sweet saints:
S antos, Santiago, Salvador, and Raphael Benedito
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P reface
B ehind the Curtain: A Manifesto for Popular Religion
T he work that follows is an invitation to draw near to the Cristo
Aparecido, the “Christ Appeared,” a sculpted image of the crucifi ed
Christ on the cross that is almost fi ve centuries old. And likewise,
through him, this study invites the reader to draw near to his loving
devotees, in particular to the devout of Totolapan, today a small
peasant community of indigenous and European origin, in the
northernmost corner of the Mexican state of Morelos. For them, the
Cristo Aparecido is not a statue but instead their beloved patron saint,
a manifestation of the divine, around which their collective spiritual
life is organized and fi nds its focus. Their faith in their Cristo is both
the starting point for and the locus of this study.
B ut how is it possible for a scholarly project to accompany a
people, even if only for a short while, on their journey of faith? Must
an academic work such as this one necessarily distance itself from
the faith of the people whom it takes as its object of study, lest the
authority of the scholarship be diminished by the association? These
questions are particularly poignant and pointed when local, popular,
or “folk” religiosities are at the center of inquiry, as these have been
subjected to many violences and violations, literal and fi gurative, of
the military, missiological, political, theological, and scholarly sort,
not least in Mexico. This is certainly the perception of the local
devotees of Totolapan, many of whom feel that their faith has been
vulnerable to offense and injury over the course of centuries, in the
present moment most of all.
viii PREFACE
P opular devotion to images seems in many instances to have made poor
and marginal communities even more vulnerable to damaging outside inter-
ventions. Consider, for example, the eighteenth-century adolescent mystic of
1
Chiapas, Mexico, María de la Candelaria. Inspired by visions and speaking as
the mouthpiece for a miraculous image of Mary called the Virgen del Rosario,
the young india galvanized an indigenous rebellion. Neither the girl nor the
image itself was ever actually seen by the many pilgrims who came to pay hom-
age; a makeshift curtain, a petate, shielded them from view in the small hermit-
age where they made their home.
F ray Simón de Lara, parish priest and d octrinero of the pueblo, led the
charge against the faith of his fl ock in 1712. Certain that it was in fact a “pagan
idol” that occupied the dark space behind the curtain, Lara sought to expose
María de la Candelaria as a diabolic fraud and a hoax. In the wake of the govern-
ment troops who had cleared the way, Fray Simón de Lara picked his way among
the recently massacred bodies of those who had assembled to protect the Virgin
and her spokeswoman, and reached the front of the ermita. There he stopped
to preach a triumphant sermon: “yes, in this very ermita, behind the petate, you
placed your idol. And it is here that you approached to pay it homage, to sell
your soul to the Devil. You spilled out holy oils upon its monstrous face. . . .
Remember now that I warned you of the great deception of María de la Cande-
2
laria, but you did not want to listen.” With the ermita surrounded and the
plaza of the pueblo overtaken, the soldiers inside pulled back the curtain to
discover not María, who had fl ed, and not an “idol,” but only an a “much-
adorned altar upon which had been placed the Virgen del Rosario with the in-
3
fant Jesus in her arms.” Government troops and the local priests conspired
together to violently eradicate this local expression of Roman Catholicism.
I n his astute refl ections on the cult, Mexican historian Juan Pedro Viqueira
Albán admires both the faith and the courageous rebellion of the people of San
Juan Evangelista Cancuc; but he also grapples with his own disbelief about
4
what is really “behind the petate.” Here the modern scholar’s own doubts
dimly echo the ultimately devastating apprehensions of Fray Simon de Lara.
Inga Clendinnen was the fi rst to caution the historian of colonial Latin America
against treading the dangerous path of the missionary. As he attempted to iso-
late the native from the Christian practices of his neophyte charges, the colo-
nial friar was “forced by the nature of his peculiar vocation to subject a lived
faith to vivisection, carving it into transportable, stateable, teachable proposi-
5
tions: a disturbing, dispiriting, and fi nally effectively disabling business.” And
indeed, it may be that the critical, questioning approach of the modern (and
yes, even the postmodern) scholar, often puzzled before the faith of the poor, is
exceeded in their skepticism only by that of the overly zealous cleric, himself
6
plagued by doubts about the legitimacy of his fl ock’s “religion.”
I have struggled here to avoid such an approach. Instead, assuming that
their faith has an integrity of its own, I have tempered my own impulse to
PREFACE ix
distance myself from that which the people of Totolapan have taken up as their
dearest belief. It is my earnest hope that nothing I write here has the potential
to weaken or challenge them in their devotion to the Cristo Aparecido. For
them, I hope this work adds to the treasury of knowledge about their Cristo.
T wo distinct intellectual movements in the last third of the twentieth cen-
tury offer me a way forward: the work of subaltern historians and that of libera-
tion theologians. As they forged their fi eld, subaltern studies historians of India
looked for ways to shape their work so as to refl ect the agency of subordinate
7
social groups “as makers of their own destiny.” Acknowledging this agency
obliged these historians to “stretch the category of the political [beyond] the
logic of secular-rational calculations inherent in the modern conception of the
8
political,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty so aptly puts it. This was particularly true
because “the peasant-but-modern political sphere was not bereft of the agency
9
of gods, spirits, and other supernatural beings.” Boldly stated, taking seriously
the agency of the subaltern may also require taking seriously the agency of the
divine, as for the subaltern so often the actions of God and the spirit are coeval
10
with the human.
T his sentiment fi nds a powerful parallel in the work of Latin American
liberation theologians writing in the 1970s and 1980s. After largely overcom-
ing an initial and nearly disastrous skepticism about popular religious practice
(an ambivalence that I will discuss at some length in chapter 6 ) , liberation
theologians and their intellectual heirs, Latino theologians, came to see their
task, in part, as articulating the sensus fi delium, the theological legitimacy of
popular ways of knowing. In their insistence on a “preferential option for the
poor,” liberation theologians have asserted that the resources of the Church
should be channeled into slums, shantytowns, and f avelas. But they have also
called scholars to reread history from the point of view of the “condemned of
the earth”: in this new approach, it was “the Indian, the peasant, the African
slave, the exploited classes, [who] would be the hermeneutic starting point for
11
history.”
H ere, then, I intend to venture with all respect behind the curtain. Not to
“lift the veil” in order to expose fallacy and fraud (as did the soldiers at María de
la Candelaria’s ermita, or Dorothy in the palace of the Wizard of Oz), but in
order to take seriously a people’s faith on their own terms and for its own sake.
This is because, as I will explain later, for believers themselves the drape is
there neither to create an illusion nor to obscure, but rather to highlight the
presence of the sacred within.
A nd so I have allowed the commitments and concerns of devotees to guide
and shape my focus here. For example, several Mexican scholars before me
have taken up the study of Fray Antonio de Roa, the sixteenth-century Spanish
Augustinian friar to whom the Cristo Aparecido fi rst appeared. Roa has been
the periodic object of scholarly-clerical interest and fascination from the close
of the sixteenth century. Here, however, though Roa appears as a protagonist in