Abstract

While the subject of native Christianization has been studied in many ways, scholars of early Mexico have seldom read the interaction between Amerindian devotions and Christianity as popular religion. My dissertation explores the rise and development of what I call “Mexican popular religion”—the fragmented bond between native devotional practices and Catholic decorum in early Mexico. I argue that this contentious coexistence generated a continuum of religious conflict from the period following the Spanish conquest to the mid seventeenth century. By exploring four facets of this religious association, the present study underscores two overarching themes. First, persecution unwittingly heightened the perceived efficacy of native pre-Columbian religion and maintained its widespread following. Second, religious conflict influenced the formal policy changes regarding the Christian welfare of Indians and thereby altered the Church’s conversion enterprise in New Spain. By the mid seventeenth century, Mexican popular religion formed a long process fraught with difference, unsuspecting contradictions, and unintended outcomes.This dissertation advances a specific paradigm of popular religion for early Mexico. Mexican popular religion describes the relationship between native ancestral devotions and Catholicism that unfolded in an ad hoc manner. Far from isolated camps, their respective actors traversed and reshaped the institutional boundaries set by Catholic decorum. The present framework, therefore, uncouples conventional binary models of popular religion by deconstructing the mediated exchanges, disputes, and pragmatic adaptations that took place within a shared religious space. Its findings suggest that religious conflict served as a mechanism of change rather than a byproduct of native Christianization in early Mexico.

The arrival of the Catholic Church in Central Mexico not only marked the beginning of its religious dominance in the region, the institution’s early inquisitorial activities forced the inadvertent process of a popular religion. The term “popular religion” classifies a binary between two religions. Here it describes the struggle between “official” Catholic doctrine and native “folk” practices which enabled, rather than eliminated, the persistence of indigenous ancestral devotions during the early colonial period. In an effort to contextualize this unintended phenomenon, the present study uses two episcopal inquisition trials from the mid to late1530s: Martín Ocelotl, a Soothsayer from Chinanta, and Cristóbal, a Day Keeper from Ocuytuco. I argue that the inquisition sanctioned and unwittingly supported the activities of native spiritual experts in three ways. First, the doctrinal and institutional recognition of native “idolatry” had cast indigenous metaphysics and materiality as legitimate threats that needed to be suppressed. Second, the pursuit against native hechiceros, or sorcerers, and their alleged activities exposed the limits of Catholicism’s spiritual reach in the new colony. Finally, public judicial punishments known as autos de fé displayed the religious frictions between Catholicism and native folk devotions. Consequently, a new cultural polarity fostered the coexistence of two competing forms of spiritual labor. The implications of these findings open new questions about the study of religion through the colonial era and beyond Central Mexico.