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Crosses, Caves, and Matachinis: Divergent Appropriations of Catholic Discourse in Northwestern New Spain*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Cynthia Radding
Cynthia Radding*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois
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Extract

… Christianity became wholeheartedly an element of indigenous culture. The Christian miracle was a given integrated into daily life as it was into the landscape, space and time of the pueblo.

Recent ethnohistorical trends point to a renewed interest in the complex interplay of beliefs and ritual practices that gave rise to multiple expressions of religiosity in different temporal and spatial settings of colonial America. Religion provides a rich thematic matrix for exploring the boundaries of alterité between Amerindian and European actors and figures centrally, as well, in the internal development of different cultural and ethnic identities. Cosmology, understood as those systems of belief that bind individuals to their communities and to the wider universe, informs different peoples' concepts of time and their sense of history. The Maya of Yucatán, for example, integrated both linear and cyclical notions of time into their cosmic order in ways that rendered sensible their rhythms of accommodation and resistance to foreign domination. Moreover, cultural constructions of the past rely heavily on myths that fuse spiritual beliefs with ethnic claims to the land, as observed in the intricate connections between syncretic religion and the survival of ethnic polities in colonial Oaxaca. Ethnic rationalizations of space, it has been argued, underwrote particular aesthetic and cognitive approaches to spatial and temporal “mapping” which, in turn, brought a religious dimension to the notion of territoriality.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , October 1998 , pp. 177 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1998

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Footnotes

*

The author acknowledges the help of the staff of the Newberry Library and the Bancroft Library, as well as the archivists of the Archivo General del la Nación, the Biblioteca Nacional, and the Cathedral of Hermosillo in Mexico, for locating materials used in this article and the financial support of the Research Board of the University of Illinois. Grateful recognition is given to Susan M. Deeds, Kenneth Mills, Thomas Cummins, and the anonymous readers of The Americas for their critical reading of earlier versions of this article. Responsibility for its final content rests with the author.

The following abbreviations appear in the footnotes: “AGN” for Archivo General de la Nación (México); “AHM” for Archivo de la Mitra de Hermosillo (Sonora); “BL HHB” for Bancroft Library, Hubert Howe Bancroft; “BNFF” for Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Jalisco, Audiencia de Guadalarajara; “NB Ayer” for Newberry Library, Ayer Collection.

References

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2 Particularly influential works include Farriss, Nancy M., Maya Society under Colonial Rule. The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; MacCormack, Sabine, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Gruzinski, , The Conquest of Mexico: Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989 [El poder sin limites. Cuatro respuestas indígenas a la dominación española, México: INAH 1988])Google Scholar; Burkhart, Louise M., The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989).Google Scholar Gibson’s, Charles classic The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar dealt with the institutional aspects of Catholicism in the Valley of Mexico. The close connections between religious expression and language have been explored by Lockhart, James, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar and in Boone, E.H. and Mignolo, W., eds., Writing Without Words (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).Google Scholar In Mexico the published symposia of the Seminario de Historia de Mentalidades, coordinated by Sergio Ortega Noriega under the auspices of INAH Dirección de Estudios Históricos, have contributed significantly to the themes of religion and mentalité: Familia y Sexualidad en Nueva España (México: SEP 1982); II Simposio de Historia de las Mentalidades: la Memoria y el Olvido (México, INAH 1985); El afán de normar y el placer de pecar (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1988).

3 Farriss, Nancy M., “Remembering the Future, Anticipating the Past: History, Time, and Cosmology among the Maya of Yucatan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29:3 (1987) 566–93;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Jones, Grant D., Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).Google Scholar

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5 Mignolo, , The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995)Google Scholar especially his analysis of Mesoamerican codices and Andean texts and pictographs in Chapter 6, “Putting the Americas on the Map: Cartography and the Colonization of Space.”

6 Ricard, Robert, La Conquête spirituelle du Mexique. Essai sur l’apostolat et les méthodes missionnaires des ordres mendicants en Nouvelle-Espagne de 1523/24 à 1572 (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1933)Google Scholar; León-Portilla, Miguel, La filosofía náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes (México: UNAM, 1959); Los antiguos mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares (Mexico: FCE/SEP 1983); Vision de los vencidos (México: UNAM 1992 [1959]);Google Scholar Wachtel, Nathan, La vision des vainçus: les indiens du Pérou devant la conquête espagnole (Paris, 1971);Google Scholar Stern, Steve J., Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Spalding, Karen, Huarochiri: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Silverblatt, Irene, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Clendinnen, Inga, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan 1517–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Lavrín, Asunción, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Mills, Kenneth, An Evil Lost to View? An Investigation of Post-Evangelisation Andean Religion in Mid-Colonial Peru (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1994)Google Scholar; Taylor, William B., Franklin, Pease G.Y., eds., Violence, Resistance, and Survival in the Americas: Native Americans and the Legacy of Conquest (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1994).Google Scholar

7 Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico, esp. Chapters 5 and 6, draws heavily on Austin,, Alfredo López, Cuerpo humano e ideología. Las concepciones de los antiguos nahuas (Mexico: UNAM, 1980);Google Scholar Hombre-Dios: Religión y política en el mundo náhuatl (México: UNAM, 1973) to develop his thesis concerning the “colonization of the imagination,” Gruzinski writes persuasively of the “Indianization of the Christian supernatural” and of the collective Christianization of the Indians. Earlier influential works that developed a syncretic view of colonial religion in New Spain include LaFaye, Jacques, Quetzalcóatl y Guadalupe: La formación de la conciencia nacional en México (México: FCE, 1977 [Paris, 1974]);Google Scholar and Carmagnani, El regreso de los dioses. A similar approach for the Andean region is Glave, Luis Miguel, Vida, símbolos, y batallas: Creación y recreación de la comunidad indígena (México: FCE, 1992).Google Scholar

8 Powers, Karen, Andean Journeys. Migratrion, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995) pp. 3 and 183.Google Scholar

9 Mills, Kenneth, “The Limits of Religious Coercion in Mid-Colonial Peru,” Past & Present 145 (1994), 85–121,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. p. 116 criticizes the term syncretism as both too imprecise and suggestive of multiple meanings. Yet I continue to find the term useful as a means of examining closely the selective and changing adaptation of religious elements and practices from different traditions, a process that was ongoing in both the European and Amerindian worlds even before the colonial encounter. Taylor, William B., Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) pp. 47–43 Google Scholar and esp. p. 54, discusses syncretism in the light of religious change, transformation, and resistance. I agree with his interpretation of syncretism as a process involving mutual (even multiple) influences and adaptations among different ethnic peoples and cultural traditions.

10 The historical literature on these colonial mission fields is vast. The following authors and titles represent some of the outstanding works that include narrative history, economic and political analysis, and cultural interpretation. Langer, Erick and Jackson, Robert H., eds., The New Latin American Mission History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Crosby, Harry W., Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697–1768 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994)Google Scholar; del Río, Ignacio, Conquista y aculturación en la California Jesuítica, 1697–1768 (México: UNAM 1984)Google Scholar; Radding, Cynthia, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Spicer, Edward H., Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Weber, David J., The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992);Google Scholar Gutiérrez, Ramón, The Jesuit Guaraní Missions (UNESCO, 1987)Google Scholar; Block, David, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Alcides, Parejas M. and Virgilio, Suárez S., Chiquitos: Historia de una utopía (Santa Cruz: CORDECRUZ, 1992);Google Scholar de Assis Bastos, Uacury Ribeiro, Os Jesuítas e seus sucessores (Moxos e Chiquitos, 1767–1830) (São Paulo, Revista de Historia 51 (1974);Google Scholar Susnik, Branislava, El indio colonial del Paraguay, (Asunción, 1965);Google Scholar Hoornaert, Eduardo, ed., Das reduções latino-americanas às luías indígenas atuais, IX Simposio Latino-americano da CEHILA, Manaus, 1981 (São Paulo: Edições Paulinas, 1982)Google Scholar; Maeder, Ernesto J.A., Bolsi, Alfredo S.C., La población guaraní de las misiones jesuíticas: Evolución y características (1761–1767) (Corrientes, Cuadernos de Geohistoria Regional no. 4, 1983)Google Scholar; Mörner, Magnus, Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits in the La Plata Region: The Hapsburg Era (Stockholm, 1955)Google Scholar; Cardiff, Guillermo Furlong, Misiones y sus pueblos de Guaraníes (Buenos Aires, 1962);Google Scholar Armani, Alberto, Ciudad de Dios y ciudad del sol: El “Estado” jesuita de los guaraníes (1609–1768) (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987 [1977]).Google Scholar

11 Noriega, Sergio Ortega, “La misión jesuítica como institución disciplinaria (1610–1720),” Memoria: XVII Simposio de Historia y Antropología de Sonora, I (Hermosillo, Universidad de Sonora, 1992) 169–80.Google Scholar

12 Johnson, Jean, “The Opata: An Inland Tribe of Sonora” in Hedrick, B.C., Kelley, J.C., Riley, C.L., eds., The North Mexican Frontier (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 169–99.Google Scholar Ortiz, Alfonso, The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being and Becoming in a Pueblo Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 30–36 Google Scholar describes two rituals of naming and “water giving” which incorporate the child into the community as a whole and into his or her moiety; both involve sponsorship.

13 Aguirre, Manuel, Doctrina Christiana y pláticas doctrinales traducidas en lengua opata por el P. Rector Manuel Aguirre de la Compañía de Jesus, quien las dedica al lllmo. Señor doctor d[on] Pedro Tamarón, Obispo de Durango (México: Colegio de San Ildefonso, 1765), p. 36.Google Scholar “No os parezca que solo para tener amistad con vuestros compadres y comadres sois padrinos; vuestra principal obligación es enseñar la doctrina, las oraciones y buenas costumbres a vuestros ahijados.”

14 de Ribas, Andrés Pérez, Triunfos de Nuestra Santa Fé, Libro Sexto, X [Páginas para la historia de Sonora II] (Hermosillo: gobierno del Estado de Sonora, 1985), p. 221–25;Google Scholar Pennington, Campbell W., The Pima Bajo of Central Sonora, Mexico 2 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1989), p. xix.Google Scholar

15 de Ribas, Pérez, Triunfos de nuestra santa fé, pp. 229–31, 245, and 248–49.Google Scholar On both the beneficent and fearsome attributes of snakes among the Akimel and Tohono O’odham (Pima) of Sonora and their Mesoamerican antecedents, see Griffith, James S., Beliefs and Holy Places. A Spiritual Geography of the Pimería Alta (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1992) pp. 3–13.Google Scholar Mills, , “Limits of Religious Coercion,” pp. 108–17;Google Scholar and Farriss, , Maya Society under Colonial Rule, p. 315 and passim Google Scholar; Burkhart, , The Slippery Earth, pp. 67, 70 and passim;Google Scholar and Gutiérrez, Ramón, When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1991) p. 82, all comment on the ambivalent meanings that were ascribed to the Christian symbol of the cross.Google Scholar

16 I have consulted the following published and manuscript texts: Smith, Buckingham, A Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language: Translated From an Unpublished Spanish Manuscript (New York: Cramoisy Press, 1861)Google Scholar; Grammar of the Pima or Nevome: A Language of Sonora, from a Manuscript of the XVIII Century (New York: Cramoisy Press, 1862); Pennington, Campbell, ed., Vocabulario en la lengua nevome: The Pima Bajo of Central Sonora, Mexico 2 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1979).Google Scholar Pennington attributed this Vocabulary and the Grammar published by B. Smith to the seventeenth-century Jesuit P. Baltasar de Loaysa associated with Onavas (1647–1671), pp. ix–xxi; Pennington, Campbell, ed., Arte y vocabulario de la lengua dohema, heve o eudeve: Anónimo (Siglo XVII) (México: UNAM, 1981)Google Scholar; Aguirre, P. Manuel, Doctrina Christiana y Platicas Doctrinales; “Sermones, confesionario breve, catechismo breve, oraciones, vocabulario breve en la lengua Opata.” Undated, attributed to fray Francisco Barbastro, who served in the Sonoran missions for nearly a quarter of a century, 1772–1800, by Alphonse Pinart (BL HHB M-M 483).Google Scholar

17 For example during the 1731 entrada to the Pima villages northeast of Cuquiárachi, Padre Christobal de Cañas, Jesuit visitor, ordered the arriving missionaries to undertake their assignments “en compañía de los padres pimas antiguos, para irnos habilitando en la lengua, trato, y conocimientos de los pimas, sus genios y costumbres.” NB Ayer 657.6 C7 1737, ff. 276–81. Juan Baptista de Anza, dirigido al Illmo. Señor Dr. D. Benito Crespo [Obispo de Durango, posteriormente de Puebla], in “de este presidio de Santa Rosa de Corodeguache y henero 7 de 1737. Conquista y conversión de la Pimería Alta. Nación de indios gentiles, vecina de los apaches, California y Nuevo México, 1727–1737,” p. 277. Jácobo Sedelmayr, missionary at Tubutama, visited a number of Yuma and Cocomaricopa villages in 1746, with the help of an interpreter who was “a Christian Yuma Indian, whom the Cocomaricopas had raised, sold to the Pimas, who sold him to the Spanish, who gave him to me.” Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 123, Anthropological Papers, no. 9: Ronald L. Ives, ed. and trans., Sedelmayr’s Relación of 1746, pp. 97–117. Ives translated the published version of Sedelmayr’s relación in Documentos para la Historia de México, Series 3, vol. 1, part 2, n.d.

18 Sedelmayr’s Relación of 1746, p. 110.

19 Serge Gruzinski has observed the disruptive effects of separating the individual from the family and community: “Normas cristianas y respuestas indígenas: apuntes para el estudio del proceso de occidentalización entre los indios de Nueva España,” de las Mentalidades, Seminario de Historia, Del dicho al hecho … Transgresiones y pautas culturales en la Nueva España (México: INAH Colección científica, 1989), pp. 111–14;Google Scholar “Individualization and Acculturation: Confession among the Nahuas of Mexico from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” Lavrín, Asunción, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 96–117.Google Scholar

20 Barbastre, “Plática de la Concepción de María Santísima,” (HHB M-M 483).

21 [Barbastro], “Sermones, confesionario breve,” (HHB M-M 483). Gruzinski, , “Normas cristianas,” pp. 111–13,Google Scholar emphasized the lineal sense of time implicit in the requirement that Indians remember their sins “in order.” See Note 3 supra.

22 Gruzinski, , “Normas cristianas y respuestas indígenas,” p. 113 Google Scholar; Rafael, Vicente, “Confession, Conversion, and Reciprocity in Early Tagàlog Colonial Society,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29:2 (1987), 320–39,CrossRefGoogle Scholar analyzes the use of language and mistranslations of theological concepts in the formulations of confessionals and catechisms.

23 The word nigua shown in Barbastro’s vocabulary for “reading” appears elsewhere in his notes with the connotation of reciting or speaking out loud.

24 Triunfos de nuestra santa fé, Libro sexto, XVIII [Páginas para la historia de Sonora II, p. 253].

25 Aguirre, Doctrina Christiana.

26 Barbastro, “Plática de la Concepción de María Santísima,” (BL HHB M-M 483).

27 Aguirre, , Doctrina Christiana, pp. 47–54.Google Scholar

28 Pennington, , Arte y vocabulario de la lengua dohema, p. 84.Google Scholar

29 See supra the account of the Aivinos’ burial shrine in a cave (Note 14). The Tohono O’odham revere I’itoi, Elder Brother, who lives in a cave in Baboquivari mountain, see Nabhan, Gary, The Desert Smells Like Rain (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982) pp. 11–22;Google Scholar Griffith, , Beliefs and Holy Places, pp. 14–30.Google Scholar

30 Barbastre, “Plática del Nacimiento de Jesuchristo, Año de 1792,” (BL HHB M-M 483).

31 Pickens, Buford, ed., The Missions of Northern Sonora: A 1935 Field Documentation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1933), pp. 24–34;Google Scholar Officer, James E., Schuetz-Miller, Mardith, Fontana, Bernard L., eds., The Pimería Alta: Missions and More (Tucson: Southwestern Mission Research Center, 1996), esp. pp. 61–94.Google Scholar

32 Pickens, , The Missions of Northern Sonora, p. 113 Google Scholar; Gómez Canedo, Lino, Sonora hacia fines del siglo XVIII. Un informe del misionero franciscano fray Francisco Antonio Barbastro con otros documentos complementarios (Guadalajara: Librería Font, 1971).Google Scholar The retablos in Arizpe were created especially to embellish the ambitious Jeusit reconstruction of the church during the 1750s.

33 de Ribas, Pérez, Triunfos de nuestra santa fé, Libro Sexto, 17, II, p. 250.Google Scholar Mills, , “The Limits of Religious Coercion,” pp. 100–01.Google Scholar

34 Griffith, , Beliefs and Holy Places, pp. 67–146;Google Scholar Fontana, Bernard L., Of Earth and Little Rain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), pp. 91–111.Google Scholar

35 BL HHB M-M 483, Barbastro, “Plática de la Concepción de María Santísima.” Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).Google Scholar

36 On the significance of ritual drinking, see: Farriss, , Maya Society under Colonial Rule; Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Village (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; de Mancera, Sonia Corcuera, El fraile, el indio y el pulque: Evangelización y em-briaguez en la Nueva España (1523–1548) (Mexico: FCE 1991).Google Scholar Jesuit reports and histories of the Sonoran missions routinely condemned native drinking. de Ribas, Pérez, Triunfos de Nuestra Santa Fé, Libro Sixto, XVIII [Tomo II, p. 253].Google Scholar

37 Pérez de Ribas, Libro Sexto, Cap. XIX [Tomo II, p. 256]. The full significance of these festivals is best researched for the Yaquis and Mayos: see Spicer, E.H., The Yaquis: A Cultural History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980) pp. 59–118;Google Scholar Crumrine, Ross, The Mayo Indians of Sonora (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), esp. pp. 63–109.Google Scholar The cycle of fiestas and cargos is well known for Mesoamerican and Mayan communities. See Gossen, Gary H., “The Chumula Festival of Games: Native Macroanalysis and Social Commentary in a Maya Carnival,” Gossen, , ed., Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community (Albany: SUNY, 1986), pp. 227–54.Google Scholar I do not think that the individualized sense of “cargo,” by which a family “threw the house out the window” in a kind of rotating redistributive system of wealth applied to the religious festivals organized under the aegis of the Sonoran missions, where collective mission wealth (and labor) likely benefited the elite chosen as ceremonial officers.

38 Jesuit Carlos de Roxas, 1744, BL M-M 1716, v. 1–77. Santa Rosalia’s feast day is still celebrated in Arizpe, now a thoroughly mestizo town.

39 AMH AD2 1800. The only cofradía I have found north of Alamos, in Sonora proper, was established in the mining real of Baroyeca, documented in this same legajo. The paucity of cofradías in Sonora contrasts with the vitality of Indian cofradías in central and southern Me soamerica. See, for example, Carmagnani, , El regreso de los dioses, pp. 132–44;Google Scholar Farriss, , Maya Society under Colonial Rule, pp. 262–271, and 320–51;Google Scholar Wasserstrom, Robert, “Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Chiapas, 1528–1790,” Macleod, M.J. and Wasserstrom, R., eds., Spaniards and Indians in Southeastern Mesoamerica (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 92–126.Google Scholar

40 Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

41 Spicer, , The Yaquis: A Cultural History, pp. 59–113;Google Scholar see also Kolaz, Thomas M., “Tohono O’odham Fariseos at the Village of Kawori’k,” Journal of the Southwest 39:1 (1997), 59–77.Google Scholar

42 Fontana, Bernard L. “The Vikita: A Biblio History,” Journal of the Southwest 29:3 (1987), 259–72Google Scholar; Jones, Richard, “The Wi’gita of Achi and Quitobac,” The Kiva 36:4 (1971), 1–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hayden, Julian D., “The Vikita Ceremony of the Papago,” Journal of the Southwest 29:3 (1987), 273–324.Google Scholar

43 Nabhan, Gary, The Desert Smells Like Rain (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982) pp. 25–38 Google Scholar; Underhill, Ruth, Papago Woman (Prospect Heights, Waveland Press, 1985 [1936]) pp. 17, 27, 69–71, and 81–2.Google Scholar

44 Morinis, Alan, Crumrine, N. Ross, “La Peregrinación: The Latin American Pilgrimage,” in Crumrine, and Morinis, , eds., Pilgrimage in Latin America (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 1–17.Google Scholar

45 Nolan, Mary Lee, “The European Roots of Latin American Pilgrimage,” Crumrine, and Morinis, , eds., Pilgrimage in Latin America, p. 24.Google Scholar

46 Kessell, , Kiva, Cross, and Crown, pp. 141–52.Google Scholar

47 Nolan, , “The European Roots of Latin American Pilgrimage,” pp. 30–2;Google Scholar de Ribas, Pérez, Triunfos de Nuestra Santa Fé, Libro Sixto, XIX [Tomo II, p. 256].Google Scholar

48 Dobyns, Henry F., “Do-it-Yourself Religion: The Diffusion of Folk Catholicism on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1821–46,” in Crumrine, and Morinis, , eds., Pilgrimage in Latin America, p. 58–70 Google Scholar; Griffith, , Beliefs and Holy Places, pp. 31–66.Google Scholar John Russell Bartlett of the U.S. and Mexico Boundary Commission observed the Magdalena fiesta in 1851: Bartlett, , Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, connected with the United States and Mexico Boundary Commission during the years 1850, ‘51, ’52, and ’53 (New York: D. Apple & Co., 1854), pp. 425–6.Google Scholar

49 BNFF 34/735; 40/912.

50 BPEJ ARAG RC 27–9–359, 1716, 15 ff. “Los pimas de Xecatacari y Obiachi a Thomas de Esquivel, temente de justícia mayor del Real de San Miguel Arcángel y su jurisdicción en la Provincia de Sonora.”

51 BNFF 32/662. P. J. Roldan, “Luz con que se debe mirar las sementeras de los Jesuitas.”

52 BNFF 38/843, f. 5–6; 38/842;38/ 844, f. 9–10.

53 AMH ADI 1797, Fr. Juan Felipe Martínez to Bishop Rouset de Jesús; BNFF 36/806, Fr. Martínez to Comandante Pedro de Nava.

54 Griffith, , Beliefs and Holy Places; Gary Nabhan, Gathering the Desert (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985).Google Scholar Lockhart, , The Nahuas after the Conquest, pp. 251–60,Google Scholar discusses this same problem. He reviews the structures of religious organizations in some detail, but merely infers cognitive beliefs from reading the preambles to colonial wills. Gruzinski, , Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands, pp. 18–24,Google Scholar analyzes Nahua phrases to explore the meaning of prophets as “vessels” for divine power; yet this reads similarly to the Christian notion of transubstantiation, whereby the mundane objects of bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist.

55 Merrill, William, “Conversion and Colonialism in Northern Mexico: The Tarahumara Response to the Jesuit Mission Program, 1601–1767,” Hefner, R. W., ed., Conversion to Christianity. Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 129–63Google Scholar; Barbastro, “Vocabulario breve,” BL HHB M M 483.

56 AGN Gobernación Caja 4, exp. s/n, f. 2-3,1836. “Los hijos de este Pueblo de Aconchi de S. Pedro, Juan Angel Piri y Gerónimo Velasco juntamente con el común de nuestro pueblo ante V.E. [State Governor of Sonora].”

57 Merrill, , “Conversion and Colonialism in Northern Mexico,” pp. 154–5.Google Scholar

58 Altman, Ida and Butler, Reginald D., “The Contact of Cultures: Perspectives on the Quincentenary,” American Historical Review 99:2 (1994), 478–503;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Merrill, , “Conversion and Colonialism,” p. 154.Google Scholar

59 Gruzinski, , The Conquest of Mexico, p. 3.Google Scholar This is different from Lockhart’s phrase, “double mistaken identity,” in The Nahuas after Conquest, p. 445, which could conceivably be applied to Opata-Spanish relations, suggesting that both parties, who entered into alliances gainst the nomadic Apaches, thought that they recognized themselves in the other, but later were disillusioned.