White colonial power limits what can be known about indigenous peoples represented in the Mexican (Spanish) archive. The documents and manuscripts that survive from the colonial period in Mexico (1519-1821) tend to represent indigenous peoples as passive subjects, and it is important to consider whether they would have recognized themselves in such descriptions. As Stephanie Wood asks, “Would [indigenous communities] have embraced such identities? Or do these identities, grievously lacking in crucial elements, tell us more about the perspectives of the nonindigenous?” (Wood 6). Wood is correct in observing that this archive is heavily embedded in a white-colonial gaze, which provides an obstacle to locating and recovering indigenous perspectives. Indeed, printing in colonial Mexico played a sociopolitical role, where the Western book served as a tool for Spanish cultural domination. The printing press as a repressive, colonial institution is best represented by the fact that “the same peninsular official who brought the printing press to New Spain, Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, is also remembered, rightly or wrongly, for the mass destruction of native Mesoamerican painted manuscripts” (Calvo 280). These conditions led to a policing of manuscript production that inhibited candid expressions or responses to Spanish colonialism. For example, in the mid-sixteenth century, Bernadino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar fluent in both Spanish and Nahuatl, collaborated with indigenous artists and wrote two versions of the conquest of Mexico. These counter-conquest narratives and pictorials were confiscated in Spain and remained largely unknown until the nineteenth century. Despite the seizure, confiscation, and destruction of indigenous counternarratives, one potential path for locating and interpreting indigenous perspectives lies sketched, painted, and penned in visual art.
The Sermones aestivales (1570) at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections & Archives provides a rare example of a colonial Mexican ink drawing. This book is a sixteenth century printed copy of Saint Vincent Ferrer’s sermons for summer services in Latin. The ink drawings on each cover, however, are from the eighteenth century and depict a 1586 event in Nueva Vizcaya, Durango. The connection between the printed text and the ink drawings, as well as the artist and their original intent, are unclear. Patrick Olson notes that “Whatever the origin, the application of colonial Mexican art to a bookbinding is plainly rare. And for such drawings to embellish a book with clear Mexican provenance, one that assuredly served early Spanish missionaries, must be singular indeed” (Olson 12). For this paper, I would like to explore the function of this book in its sixteenth and eighteenth century context. Most importantly, I will argue that the ink drawing on the front cover is an agentic image that captures an event important to the local history of the indigenous community in Nueva Vizcaya, Durango.
Like texts, images also offer innumerable interpretations that might transgress the original intentions of the authors and artists, as Wood explains “Truth and meaning – however multiple, relative, tentative, or illusive they may be – are still highly worthwhile objects of pursuit, whether they hide behind words or images” (Wood 11). I do not recover indigenous voices or truths in this paper, especially not through parachuting into the archive and mining scholarly sources that do not often draw on indigenous notions of time, oral histories, or other memory technologies. Rather, I approach this archive and these sources in the same way that Saidiya Hartman approaches the archive of slavery. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman argues that the archive of slavery is grounded on violence, creating subjects and objects of power that limits the assertions that can be made about enslaved people. Hartman offers a new methodology for approaching and writing about the archive, a practice she calls “critical fabulation.” She explains,
By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I [attempt] to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.
Saidiya Hartman. “Venus in Two Acts,” 11.
This paper intends to dabble and jeopardize a series of events, such as the Christian conversion of indigenous peoples in central Mexico and the war against the Chichimecas in the mid-sixteenth century. The first event led to the production of this book, and the latter, to the ink drawing. A critical fabulation of the drawing on the binding of Sermones aestivales, I hope, will allow us to arrive at one possibility for interpreting the memory its ink captures.
Nahua Christianity in Central Mexico
The Sermones aestivales is a second edition of the sermons of Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419) published by Philippus Nutius and edited by Daminaus Díaz. There are two possible locations for the ownership of this book. The title page details an early ownership inscription of the Convento de Veichiapa (a monastery now known as San Mateo Atlatahucan in the Mexican state of Morelos). However, Olson suggests that Nahuatl orthography indicates that the owner was more likely the Franciscan convent at San Mateo Huichapan in Hidalgo, which was built in 1560. It is reasonable to suspect that because both of these convents are located in central Mexico, and are approximately three hours apart in contemporary time, that they might have shared the book or transferred ownership – Convento de Veichiapa (the written inscription) was built ten years after San Mateo Huichapan. Furthermore, Olson surmises that the sixteenth century book served as a proselytizing device for Spanish missionaries who sought to convert indigenous communities to Christianity. The book is in excellent condition – there are no missing pages, heavy markings, or visible damages – but the quality alone cannot speak to how many people heard these sermons, how they understood them, or the diverse ways that they negotiated and encompassed this new religion into their lives.
There is a common misconception that because indigenous communities lived under Spanish colonial domination, that they sacrificed their culture and converted to Christianity as an act of survival. While this narrative may have been true for some people, it hardly allows us to consider indigenous peoples as principal actors in their own conversion or as co-creators of a Nahua Christianity. Jennifer Scheper Hughes argues that “Even when recast as contemporary critical discourse, these paradigms rehearse colonialist categories and narratives inherited from the Spanish missionaries themselves” (93-4). In fact, many indigenous-authored sources show that many communities did not portray themselves as vanquished or defeated and instead, centered their local histories alongside Christian religion – this might also be the case for the Sermones aestivales, which I will discuss later. One example of this fusion of histories is the Oaxacan map, Mapa de Teozacualco (1580) located at the Benson Library at the University of Texas, Austin. This map was created by indigenous cartographers, painters, and scribes who codified indigenous knowledge and cut across European cartographic conventions in their representation of Oaxaca. Additionally, the map crossed temporal boundaries and was more intelligible to an indigenous viewer, as opposed to the intended Spanish audience. Hughes explains, “Anchored in the present, tied to the past, and oriented to the future. . .the mapas are fundamentally propositional: that is, with the king as their stated audience, the mapas are proffered covenant, articulating a particular vision for a Christian future anchored in the indigenous present” (96-7). This map suggests that there was a middle ground between Spanish and indigenous cultural encounters, where indigenous communities negotiated and acquired “new competencies” without relinquishing their culture, history, and ways of knowing. To avoid reinscribing indigenous people as passive subjects in the history of colonial Mexico, it is important to keep this middle ground in mind when examining historical narratives about Christian conversion.
There are no individual studies on the sixteenth century indigenous communities in Hidalgo or Morelos. There is, however, a study about Sierra Norte de Puebla and the conversion of the Nahua and Totonac peoples during this period. Because Puebla is in the middle of both Morelos and Hidalgo, this study can provide a glimpse of the Franciscan conversion project in adjacent indigenous communities. Moreover, the study can also offer some insight into the ways that indigenous people negotiated Christian religion. Building on the work of Robert Ricard, Louise M. Burkhart, and James Lockhart, in the book The Sun God and the Savior, Guy Stresser-Péan examines the conversion of the Nahua and Totonac peoples in central Mexico and the active role they took in their conversion. After the siege of Tenochtitlan and the capture of the Aztec ruler Cuauhtémoc in 1521, Hernán Cortés developed and implemented the encomienda system to consolidate his power in the central region of Mexico. Under this system, indigenous communities were placed under the authority of a Spanish encomendero who was tasked with ensuring the submission and conversion of indigenous community members. Due to the language barrier and cruel treatment of indigenous peoples at the hands of the Spaniards, communities were not easily persuaded into Christian conversion.
The first Franciscan missionaries, also known as the Twelve Apostles of Mexico, arrived in 1523 after walking barefoot from Veracruz to Mexico City. At first, there was no attempt to expunge indigenous communities of their customs, languages, and ways of knowing. Instead, the primary goal of these missionaries was to create an ideal Christian world that accommodated indigenous knowledge; albeit, only knowledge that was useful to the Spaniards. The Franciscans sought to create a world that remained “separate from that of the Spaniards and their vices. Such an Indian world had to be preserved and could be isolated from the Spaniards through language barriers. Their customs, once purified of remaining traces, were worthy of being known and studied” (Stresser-Péan 6). In the first five years of their arrival, the missionaries learned Nahuatl and preached through interpreters. But, few adults were convinced to convert, so all efforts turned to converting “well-chosen” children and teaching the more talented ones to read and write in Spanish. The treatment and conduct of the Spanish encomenderos, again, prevented indigenous peoples (specifically adults) from desiring acculturation and conversion.
Soon, the Franciscan missionaries understood that the survival of indigenous religions also meant the potential for rebellion. In 1525, several missionaries, assisted by young neophytes, chased indigenous peoples, destroyed idols, seized, and set fire to the tallest pagan temple in the city of Texcoco. Similar temple fires occurred in Cuautitlán, Amecameca, Tlalmanalco, Tenango, Huejotzingo and Tlaxcala in an attempt to “break their adversaries’ spirit of resistance.” Other efforts targeted the conversion of indigenous chiefs, nobles, and community leaders who also surveilled and policed community members and their religious practices. One of the Twelve Apostles, Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, reported to the Spanish crown that indigenous communities were fully Christianized between 1530-40, but this may have been an overestimation or a wish-fulfillment. By the middle of the sixteenth century, idolatry, temples, indigenous priests, and public ceremonies were virtually eliminated. Even more compelling is that many indigenous people, including elites, misunderstood baptism – they thought of it as a sign of Spanish allegiance, not conversion. Monotheism, or the worship of a singular god, was an idea that was hard to grapple with, Stresser-Péan writes,
Stresser-Péan. The Sun God and the Savior, 14.
Mesoamerican religion was particularly syncretic, for it had developed over centuries by incorporating aspects of different traditions. Acculturation occurred as a result of invasions and conquests but also sometimes peaceably through the dispersal of cultural elements regarded as prestigious. Under these circumstances, it seemed perfectly normal to adopt a new form of worship without abandoning preceding ones.
The syncretism of indigenous, Mesoamerican religion made it more difficult to determine whether conversion to a monotheistic, Christianity was successful. There was also the possibility of religious passing – community members could practice Christian rituals, while also practicing the rituals from their other professed religious identities behind closed doors. Although sporadic revolts did occur, rebellion did not always have to be loud, violent, or visible – indigenous people also negotiated, understood, and adopted Christianity on their own terms.
There are many ways that indigenous communities took active roles in the creation of a Nahua Christianity. One could even argue that indigenous peoples were the architects of this religion; in fact, “indigenous painting, masonry, and stonework defined the architecture of ‘Indian churches’ of New Spain” and by the end of the sixteenth century, most churches were under the care and authority of local indigenous leaders (Hughes 103). Churches and chapels were not only built with indigenous labor, but they were also built over sacred landscapes and histories that allowed communities to reclaim an indigenous past within a colonial present. For example, in the mid-sixteenth century at the chapel of Tepeyac, formerly dependent on the Franciscan convent of Cuauhtitlan, a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary appeared. After this sight, indigenous peoples venerated the image and called it “Tonantzin,” meaning our mother. The archbishop of Tepeyac in 1556 called for the worship of Our Lady of Guadalupe by both indigenous people and the Spaniards. Two days later, Francisco de Bustamente “preached violently against this devotion, which he believed was dangerous insofar as it encouraged the cult of images among the Indians. . .[he later] added another criticism: the Marian sanctuary thus consecrated was built on the site of the ancient pagan sanctuary dedicated to Tonantzin, the Mother of Gods” (Stresser-Péan 31). This example, along with the Mapa de Teozacualco (1580), shows that Christianity was not just a product of colonial terror and violence; indigenous communities accommodated this religion into their own social structures and histories. And perhaps, one of the reasons why Christianity in Mexico has survived this long, is because indigenous communities allowed it to. It is no surprise that the proselytizing device, the Sermones aestivales, also yielded to different indigenous preferences over time as well.
Picturing the Chichimeca War: Documenting Local Histories
The function of the Sermones aestivales changes in the eighteenth century when two ink drawings are penned on both covers of the binding. Olson observes that the style of the drawings resembles those in the títulos primordiales, or “municipal histories in the 17th and 18th centuries [produced] to bolster their land claims against the Spanish” (Olson 13). It is also worth noting that the títulos primordiales, such as the Códice Selden and Códice Tulane include large genealogies and a sacred history that rolls over into the colonial period albeit without any mention of the Spanish conquest or the Spaniards – this might signal that the títulos primordiales were produced to resolve internal conflicts. If the ink drawings were penned by the same individual(s) or workshop that produced the títulos primordiales, it is possible that they were the work of an indigenous artist since these documents were produced by and for indigenous people.
There is very little paratextual information to guide our understanding of the two ink drawings. The ink drawing on the back cover of the binding features a man who wears a shirt, bottoms, and appears to be crucified. The caption on this image is also illegible, only two words can be made out: “Fray” and “Bastian.” Olson offers two possible identifications for the martyred individual, Fray Andrés de la Puebla or Sebastián de Aparicio, the latter who was “a 16th-century Spanish businessman turned ascetic friar who made frequent visits to the Franciscans in Tlalnepantla” (Olson 12). After looking at other visual depictions of Sebastián de Aparicio, I can confirm that he is not the individual depicted in the ink drawing – Sebastián had a tonsure, while the figure in the ink drawing has textured hair and a dark mustache. Furthermore, Sebastián was not martyred, he died of a hernia at the age of 98 in 1600. Although I cannot find many details about Fray Andrés, since he was a Franciscan, he too would have had a tonsure and should also be ruled out. I have no idea who this figure is and cannot offer an alternative identification at this time. Even more interesting, I think, is the ink drawing on the front cover of the binding. This ink drawing provides just enough details to critically fabulate and create meaning out of this scene.
The ink drawing on the front cover provides a date and location: Nueva Vizcaya, Durango, 1586. Although there is additional text on this drawing, it is very difficult to read. This scene captures a conflict between two individuals and includes many smaller details in its landscape: trees, pyramids, a tombstone or pictograph, a church at the center, stones, and what appears to be a third individual kneeling in prayer. One of the two main figures, the individual on the left, wears a headdress and staff, and has an arrow through his abdomen. While the second figure on the right does not wear a headpiece and bears a bow and arrow. The catalog description identifies the figures in this scene as the Tlaxcaltecas and the Chichimecas. These are identifications that I substantiate in my discussion as well. The Tlaxcaltecas were Spanish allies, while the Chichimecas, also known as friar martyrs, were enemies whom the Spanish had waged a long war against (1550-1590). A brief overview of the history of this location and the war against the Chichimecas helps paint a clearer picture of this ink drawing.
Prior to the arrival of Francisco de Ibarra, who established settlements in Nueva Vizcaya in 1563, this region was inhabited by the Tepehuanes, Conchos, Acaxees, and Xiximes. Spaniards like Ibarra settled in this region because of a silver rush that started in the 1540s and 1550s, which caused many settlers to flood north. When they could not compel these indigenous groups to work at the silver mines, the Spaniards imported Black slaves, Indians, mestizos, and mulattos from southern Mexico. The next three decades were marked with conflict – bursts of massacres and raids between the Spanish and indigenous peoples, and between different indigenous tribes – a series of events now known as “The Chichimeca War.” One particular conflict was between the Acaxees, a Spanish ally, and the Xiximes. The Xiximes resented the acculturation and Christian conversion of the Acaxees and incited several incursions against them. Susan M. Deeds explains that the Xiximes were “recalcitrant about giving up their customs and showed no fear in boldly taunting their adversaries. Playing a game of words, they exploited Spanish concerns about their apparent ritual cannibalism, no doubt taking some delight in embellishing their culinary preferences” (22). The terms Xiximes and Chichimecas are both very similar in pronunciation and it is important to note that there is much confusion about this latter term, which is “a generic Nahuatl term (from Aztec times) that became synonymous with supposedly barbarian, nomadic peoples who originated in the far north and periodically invaded the territories of more ‘civilized’ sedentaries” (Deeds 41). This term was created by the white Spaniards and was used indiscriminately to refer to any groups or tribes in proximity to Querétaro, Cuitzeo, Lake Chapala, and Guadalajara in the south; by Tlaltenango, Colotlan, and Nombre de Dios in the west; by Cuencamé, Parras, and Saltillo in the north; by Valles, Xilitla, and Zimapán in the east. It is possible that the Xiximes would have also been identified as Chichimecas by the Spanish, not only because both terms seem to be homonyms, but because both groups were also cannibals. Most importantly, however, the origin and use of the term “Chichimeca” makes it difficult to accurately identify the “Chichimeca” figure in the ink drawing. This figure would have likely not used this term to identify himself, and we can speculate that the artist also had a different, more specific term in mind. For lack of a better term, I will continue using “Chichimeca” to describe the figure on the right with the bow and arrow.
The Compendio Historico del Concilio III Mexicano, compiled by Fray Alonso Ponce in 1585, also offers a glimpse into how the Chichimecas were identified along with strategies that the Spanish used to contain conflicts. By 1570, the Spanish settlers debated the enslavement and extermination of the Chichimecas, who were the biggest obstacle to northern expansion in Mexico. According to Ponce, the Chichimecas were “among the most barbarous and ferocious that the Spaniards had as yet encountered. Physically they were an attractive people…well-built, dark, robust, graceful, and capable of great work” (qtd. in Poole 118). After all conversion efforts of the Chichimecas failed, the Spanish established settlements of armed men and missionaries to subdue the Chichimecas with a combination of Catholic doctrine and military coercion. Between 1579 and 1582, it was estimated that the Chichimecas killed more than a thousand people, which led to a call to action for a meeting among Spanish secular and religious leaders. In 1584-1585, the Third Mexican Provincial Council met to discuss the progress and status of the Chichimeca problem. Hernando de Robles recommended a war arguing that “slavery is not a punishment for the Chichimecas, rather it is an improvement of their lot, despite the dictum of law that slavery is equivalent to death. For they wander about like beasts, wild, nude, eating grass and human flesh, exposed to all the injuries of the weather, dying of hunger and thirst” (Poole 133). Considering the various opinions and rationales for a war against the Chichimecas, the Third Council ultimately decided that they would not wage war and that the establishment and pacification of Spanish and Christianized indigenous peoples was a better solution to the problem. Along with this measure, the Chichimecas were encouraged to settle “near the pueblos of newly arrived Tlaxcalan colonizers, allies of the white men” (Powell 338). The ink drawing on the front cover of the binding might capture the tension of this cohabitation.
Graphic images like pictorials served as indigenous texts and occasionally included brief glosses and explanations. The ink drawing on the cover of Sermones aestivales does not gloss the identities of the figures or even provide any details that explain the violence in this scene. One of the challenges of encountering such images, Stephanie Wood notes, is interpreting them “as intended by the artists who painted them and as they might have been read by indigenous audiences” (24). An examination of recurring figures, contexts, and themes in an array of images is one technique for tracing patterns and beginning to understand the meaning of indigenous graphics. Indeed, based on another visual depiction of the war against the Chichimecas in the sixteenth century, it is clear that the ink drawing on the binding fits into previous descriptions and depictions of this historical event.
Robert H. Jackson examines the battle murals painted on the north and south walls of the church San Miguel Arcángel at Ixmiquilpan (Hidalgo) as propaganda for the recruitment of the local indigenous population, the Hñahñu/Otomí people, for the war against the Chichimecas. These murals were commissioned by the Augustinians who supported Spanish expansion and believed that “since the Chichimecas had not embraced Christianity; they were still subject to satanic influence and were employed by Satan to challenge the Augustinian’s evangelization campaign” (Jackson 146). The murals incorporated both indigenous iconographic references and Spanish perspectives about the Chichimecas.
However, Jackson explains that the iconographic references to the yaoyotl (flowery war) and eagles (used to represent the sun) indicate that the Augustinians were ignorant of Hñahñu/Otomí history and glorified a warrior culture “as a means of facilitating the process of evangelization. . . and most importantly the Hñahñu/Otomí contribution to the military effort against the Chichimecas” (151). After the threat of the Chichimecas diminished, these murals were covered over after 1585 with new designs. This mural image includes many more details than the ink drawing; in this depiction, the Chichimeca wears European-style clothes, no hats or headpieces, and is heavily racialized. If we compare this depiction to the one on the cover of the binding, we see many similarities – the position, the choice of weapon, and even, the style of dress. The juxtaposition of these two images shows that the Chichimeca figure is the aggressor in both contexts, the sixteenth century mural and the eighteenth century ink drawing. Yet, the figure of the Chichimeca poses a different threat in each iteration – in the mural, the “evil” Chichimecas threaten the Augustianian evangelization project, and in the Sermones aestivales the Chichimeca threatens the other indigenous peoples, the Tlaxcaltecs, and their respective community. The eighteenth century ink drawing, therefore, centers a local historical event within a colonial paradigm (that is, the sixteenth century proselytizing book).
In the eighteenth century, tribute burdens and competition over land threatened indigenous leadership and communities. To protect their families and communities from outside threats, they began documenting local histories and “revitalizing a tradition that spanned Mesoamerica, they wrote down oral traditions, translated or copied painted ones, and assembled and rewrote documentary fragments of town history, lacing their ‘primordial titles’ with a strong dose of micropatriotism and heightened awareness of Spanish menace” (Wood 148). The títulos primordiales were one example of the revitalization of local, indigenous history; however, the ink drawing on the Sermones aestivales appears to be another as well. The sixteenth century book, initially produced to serve Spanish missionaries in the conversion of indigenous peoples, yields to a new purpose: commemorating an inter-tribal conflict between the Chichimecas and Tlaxcaltecas in 1586 at Nueva Vizcaya, Durango. Indigenous people were not only agents and co-creators of a Nahua Christianity, but as this ink drawing shows, they were authors of their own histories, preserving memories important to their communities, its leadership, and autonomy. This ink drawing proves to be an agentic image that accommodates a device from its colonial past for an indigenous past, present, and future.
Works Cited
- Calvo, Hortensia. “The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America.” Book History, vol 6 (2003). 277-305.
- Deeds, Susan M. Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya. University of Texas Press, 2003.
- Despland, Michel (2018) Latin America 1520–1600: a page in the history of the study of religion, Religion, 48:4, 545-567.
- Frizzi, Romero, María de los Ángeles; Oudijk, Michel R. LOS TÍTULOS PRIMORDIALES: UN GÉNERO DE TRADICIÓN MESOAMERICANA. DEL MUNDO PREHISPÁNICO AL SIGLO XXI. Relaciones: Estudios de historia y sociedad, 24.3 (2003), 19-48.
- Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12. 2 (2008), 1-14.
- Hughes, Jennifer Scheper. “Mapping the Autochthonous Indigenous Church: Toward a Decolonial History of Christianity in las Americas.” Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives, edited by Raimundo Barreto and Roberto Sirvent. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
- Jackson, Robert H. Conflict and Conversion in Sixteenth Century Central Mexico: The Augustinian War on and Beyond the Chichimeca Frontier. Brill, 2013.
- Olson, Patrick. Rare Books Catalog 3 (2019).
- Poole, Stafford.“‘War by Fire and Blood’ the Church and the Chichimecas 1585.” The Americas 22.2 (1965). 115-137.
- Powell, Phillip Wayne. “The Chichimecas: Scourge of the Silver Frontier in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 25.3 (1945). 315-338.
- Stresser-Péan, Guy. The Sun God and the Savior: The Christianization of the Nahua and Totonac in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico. University Press of Colorado, 2012
- UI Special Collections, x-Collection, BX1756.V65 S47 1570.
- Wood, Stephanie. Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico. University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.
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