9.1 The Church in the Colonial City
Hispanic colonization of the Americas bore essentially urban features. During the reign of the Spanish, some 1,000 urban centers were founded as the starting point of their wider conquests and permanent presence in the New World. Uniformly laid out in a checkerboard pattern from the outset – and thus more “modern” than the winding downtowns of medieval Europe – the colonial Spanish settlements were mostly developed in the 16th or early 17th century in the imposing Baroque style. Magnificent churches and spacious monasteries dominated the cityscape. In the center of the colonial metropolises (such as Mexico, Lima or Quito) there was a mostly rectangular or square square, the plaza mayor or plaza de armas, seat of the political, ecclesiastical and municipal powers. Around it were grouped the cathedral, the bishop’s residence, the governor’s palace and the town hall. In the streets that branched off at right angles from the plaza mayor were the houses of the nobles. Further away were the streets of the artisans and merchants. In the outskirts lived the lower service personnel and the poor of the city – mestizos, blacks and Indians, the majority living around their own churches. Even the simple country towns were always built around a large square with a church as the center.
The central plaza functioned at the same time as an arena of public life and the scene of colorful processions. These also served the self-representation of the different groups of colonial society, in a strictly regimented hierarchical sequence. The great festivals of the ecclesiastical year (such as Corpus Christi), civil commemoration days, the name days of the local saints – in Lima, for example, around the middle of the 17th century, 35 in number –, the holding of monastery chapters, the entry of a new bishop, and (in Mexico, Lima or Cartagena) occasionally the macabre ceremonies of the Inquisition provided the occasion for celebration. The processions ended with the entry of the ecclesiastical and secular dignitaries into the cathedral, followed by the various estates, guilds, and lay congregations. These included the various congregations of Indians, mulattoes or blacks, who marched at the end of each. The pageants were accompanied by music, singing, theater (such as on the stages of local Jesuit schools), or evening fireworks. [cf. Photo J01/02; J10]
Not only in the organization of processions, but quite generally, the various lay congregations or brotherhoods played an important role in the religious
Particular importance was attached to the black brotherhoods in Brazil. The first examples are attested there since 1552. They achieved a significant presence between 1650 and 1700, especially in the coastal cities. In a country with only a weakly developed colonial church apparatus, they developed in many cases into “autonomous or semi-autonomous organizations” within the church.1 They became instruments of ethnic solidarity and demands for greater social justice. They repeatedly facilitated the ransom of enslaved members, represented them even to colonial authorities, built transregional networks, and kept alive the memory of the African homeland. Thus, alongside the Catholicism of the white masters, an Afro-Brazilian Catholicism was formed, which had a decisive influence on the subsequent development.
Along with men’s convents, women’s convents occupied a prominent place in the layout of Spanish colonial cities. There were “six famous and excellent convents for women” in Lima in the 1620s [Text 241a] and more than twenty in Mexico City at the end of the century (Brazil lagged behind; the first convent did not open until 1677). Between 10 and 20% of the female urban population, according to individual estimates, could live in the houses of the women’s congregations. The women’s convents also reflected the social structure of colonial society, with lavishly furnished rooms for the “brides of Christ” from the upper classes, each with their own servants, and modest cells for members of the lower classes.
Probably the most famous nun of the Spanish colonial period is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695), who was celebrated early on as the “tenth muse of Mexico” [Figure 14]. An illegitimate child from a humble provincial family, she soon attracted attention for her insatiable thirst for knowledge. She gained attention and encouragement from the Viceroy’s wife and decided to enter a convent at the age of 18. Life there seemed to her preferable to marriage, as it allowed her – with her own library – to pursue her broad intellectual interests
I wish these interpreters … of St. Paul would explain to me how they understand this: ‘Let women keep silence in the church’ [1 Cor. 14:34]. For they must understand it either materially, to mean the pulpit and the lecture hall, or formally, to mean the community of all believers. If they understand it in the first sense … – then why do they rebuke those who study in private? But if they understand it in the second sense and wish to extend the apostle’s prohibition to all instances without exception, so that women are not even permitted to write or study privately – why then did the Church permit a Gertrude, a Theresa [of Avila], a Brigid, the nun of Agreda, and many others to write? [Text 243b]
Eventually, she came into conflict with the bishop of Puebla. She was forced to dissolve her library and give up her scientific instruments. A short time later, she died in the service of plague patients. Tragic as her end was, this biography is nevertheless remarkable as an example of a woman in a colonial context who consciously preferred life in a convent to conventional marriage.
As early as 1551, Emperor Charles V had two universities established in Mexico City and Lima. They were endowed with the same privileges as the famous University of Salamanca in metropolitan Spain [cf. Text 241c]. In total, 26 universities were established in Spanish America throughout the colonial period. In contrast, no universities were founded in colonial Brazil. Prominent thinkers and authors who had received an education there, for example at the Jesuit College in Bahia, then went on to Portugal to acquire academic degrees at the universities of Coimbra or Évora. In general, school education in Ibero-America was in the hands of the church. The Dominican and Jesuit orders were particularly prominent in this regard. In the smaller towns, the monasteries often fulfilled this task. In the capitals, each order had secondary schools (colegios) for the education of future friars. It was especially the Jesuits who very soon opened schools also for the preparation of secular professions. This with considerable success; large parts of the future Creole elite received a qualified education there. This was an essential reason, conversely, for the rapid social and economic rise of the Society of Jesus in colonial America. Initially open also to selected individual youths from the Indian nobility, universities, colleges and finally even elementary schools were later increasingly closed to them.
9.2 Native American and Mestizo Voices
For a long time, the history of Christianity in Ibero-America has been described primarily from the perspective of missionary or colonial sources. Yet there is a wealth of testimony from local actors documenting the broad spectrum of indigenous (and African American) responses to the introduction of Christianity. They range from complete acceptance to bitter resistance. As the “beginning of our misery,” for example, a Mayan priest in the early 17th century laments the activities of Spanish missionaries [Text 247]. Conversely, texts such as the “Morning Prayer” of a Christian Ketschua (c. 1600) impress with their lyricism and the combination of Indian nature mysticism with the language of the Psalms [Text 245]. The Mexican historian and anthropologist David Tavárez speaks of a multitude of “indigenous Christianities” in the process of merging ancient American and Christian traditions.3
One of the best known indigenous Christian voices from colonial Spanish America is the famous pictorial chronicle of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (ca. 1535/1550 to after 1616) from Peru. ‘El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno’ (The New Chronicle and Good Government) is the title of his work – written in Spanish and partly in Ketschua – which Guamán Poma, who came from an Inca family, wrote towards the end of his life to draw the attention of the Spanish king Philip III to the crying grievances in his empire [Text 249]. The “Chronicle,” a world history from an Inca perspective, begins with Adam and Eve and leads first to the appearance of “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” This was born – so it is said – when “Julius Caesar” ruled in Rome and the “Inca Cinche Roca” in the Peruvian Cuzco. Thereafter, both lines of tradition – that of the Roman emperors and popes on the one hand and the Inca rulers in Cuzco on the other – continue until they are joined again at the time of the conquest
The section on “Good Government” then contains the reform proposals of Guamán Poma. These are based on the social and economic structures of Inca society, the adoption of positive elements of Western culture and Christianity, adapted to the practical needs of the Andean population. For the Inca rulers once treated their subjects far better than the Spaniards do at present; and King Philip III is being asked to reinstate Indians in positions of responsibility. Indigenous Christians, unlike most Spaniards, are portrayed as pious and merciful. They are good artists, sculptors, musicians, church singers, and familiar with all aspects of the worship life. If they were not constantly hindered by the corrupt colonial elite, there would be among them “saints and great scholars and the most Christian of Indians.”4 Guamán Poma’s work, discovered only in 1908 in a Danish archive, has become famous primarily because of the approximately 400 drawings that depict social, economic and religious life in Peru in the early 17th century. They are regarded as outstanding historical and ethnographic documents and have meanwhile also found their way also into the pop culture of Latin America.
Performing arts were also an important medium for articulating indigenous perspectives. In the cathedral of Cuzco (Peru), for example, there is a representation of the Last Supper (cena ultima) by the Indian-Christian artist Marcos Zapata (1710–1773). In addition to Andean flora and fauna, it shows a guinea pig – still considered a delicacy in Peru today – as a communion dish and the local chicha as a drink [Figure 13; Photo J04/05]. Marcos Zapata was an outstanding representative of the so-called Cuzco School, whose paintings were not only popular in colonial Peru, but also in other regions of Spanish America. Their beginnings date back to the middle of the 16th century. After a dispute with their Spanish colleagues at the end of the 17th century, the Indian and
9.3 Jesuit Reductions (1609–1768)
One of the most remarkable experiments in the entire colonial period of Ibero-America was the establishment of the so-called Reductions in the border region of today’s Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil in the 17th and 18th centuries [see Text 250–252]. These were protective settlements established by the Jesuits for the semi-nomadic Guaraní Indians living there. These were “brought together” in permanent villages and settled – under paternalistic control of the Fathers, but shielded from the rest of colonial society. Within the Spanish colonial empire, the Reductions, being directly subordinate to the Crown, enjoyed extensive autonomy. Spanish settlers were forbidden to stay there. Foreign traders were only allowed to stay in the reduction area for up to three days and to negotiate with the Indians in the presence of a missionary. Above all, however, the Reductions were removed from the commend system and the associated system of serfdom and forced labor. The reduction Indians were thus not available to the Spanish landowners as cheap labor – which led to fierce conflicts between the Jesuits and the encomenderos from the beginning.
The founding of reductions in itself was not a new invention. First attempts to form closed mission territories, protected from the arbitrariness of Spanish colonists, but under the sovereignty of the Spanish king, had already taken place in the 16th century (for example, by Las Casas in the ‘Verapaz’ in the area of present-day Guatemala). In the face of the resistance of the European settlers, they failed, as did other earlier undertakings of this kind. In 1604, the Jesuit Province of Paraguay was founded. Shortly thereafter, the first reductions were established there. In the first half of the 18th century, the region between the Rio Paraná, the Rio Uruguay and the Rio Paraguay included 30 reductions with up to 104,000 inhabitants. Other mission settlements were also established in the lowlands of present-day Bolivia and Peru. In 1767 – when the Jesuits were expelled from South America – about 200,000 indigenous people lived in the approximately 70 Indian settlements that still existed at that time.
Individual villages (or rural towns) contained up to 8,000 or more inhabitants. Here, too, magnificent churches with bell towers formed the center and towered over the marketplace and the simple houses of the indigenous people, which were built of rammed earth and had thatched roofs [Text 251]. The church architecture combined forms of the European baroque with local architecture and Indian decoration. The Jesuits specifically promoted the
The economic and social constitution of the Reductions combined traditional Indian structures with social patterns introduced from Europe. It has been described as “an agrarian collectivism, but one in which private property was not entirely absent.”5 Most of the land was communal, and to cultivate it each Indian had to work two to three days a week. The proceeds were used to pay royal tribute, maintain the church and its institutions, and care for orphans, widows, the aged, and the sick. The own land – which could not be inherited – ensured that the families were provided for as equally as possible. Regular work on the communal land was strictly controlled, although the Jesuits relied more on educational measures than on coercion. The most severe punishment was expulsion from the reduction.
The Jesuit reduction system has been judged quite controversially. As a “holy experiment”, a “Christian alternative to colonialism and Marxism”, and a model of careful cultural change under the conditions of Spanish colonial rule, it has received admiration and recognition. For others, it has been the object of sharp criticism as a clerical-paternalistic theocracy and a kind of “spiritual concentration camp.” In any case, it is remarkable that no case of revolt against the Jesuits is known in the Reductions. In view of the numerical proportions – a total of about 60 fathers faced more than 100,000 men there, some of them armed – this speaks for the inner authority of the Jesuit clergy.
The end of what its opponents called the “Jesuit state” in Paraguay came from the outside. Not only to the Spanish settlers, but also to the colonial government, the political and economic autonomy of the Reductions was increasingly becoming a thorn in the flesh. In the face of growing centralist tendencies in the now prevailing bureaucratic state absolutism (as well as in times of fierce anti-Jesuit propaganda in enlightened Europe), the Jesuits’ relative commercial autonomy no longer fit the picture. The immediate trigger of the conflict was the Treaty of Madrid in 1750, which provided for corrections in the boundary between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the Americas. The settlements of the Guaraní Indians were directly affected. When they resisted the threat of resettlement, the Spanish crown took action. The
In the 17th and 18th centuries, there were also protective villages for Indians in other regions, for example in Brazil, established by Jesuits and other orders. Comparable institutions for African-American slaves were lacking there, although a Catholicism of its own character was able to develop in the refugee villages of runaway black slaves (quilombo).
9.4 On the Eve of Independence
Until the end of the Spanish (and Portuguese) colonial era, Protestantism played hardly any role on the South American mainland. It was present there more as an enemy image (as result of considerable counter-Reformation propaganda) than as a physical presence. It is true that there were short-term colonial advances (especially by the Calvinist Dutch in Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1630–1654) and repeated trials (and death sentences) by the Inquisition against stranded Protestant sailors or Western European corsairs. In addition, strict book censorship sought to prevent the penetration of Protestant ideas into Hispano-America. On the periphery of the Spanish colonial empire, however, in the Caribbean as well as some enclaves on the neighboring mainland, Western European Protestant powers established themselves from the mid-17th century. In 1655, the English conquered Jamaica, and in 1666, the Danes occupied the Virgin Islands. The Dutch established themselves in Dutch Guiana. Protestant colonial churches were formed there, as well as missionary activities by German Moravians or English Methodists among African slaves in the later 18th century. The latter led to the formation of Afro-Caribbean congregations there.
In the monarchies of Spain and Portugal, the spirit of enlightened absolutism had taken hold in the mid-18th century. This had a direct impact on the respective colonies. In Spain, under King Charles III (r. 1759–1788), there were numerous reforms in administration, trade and the economy. The driving force behind similar changes in Portugal was the prime minister Marquis of Pombal, de facto holder of governmental power (r. 1750–1777). Both Iberian crowns sought to increase access to their overseas territories in order to better exploit resources there. Both governments considered the colonial church an
The latter in particular was one of the measures that met with sharp criticism in the Spanish colonies. The structural discrimination of the Creoles (i.e., the Spaniards born in America) was opposed, for example, in a petition from the city of Mexico dated May 5, 1771, addressed to King Charles III. Remarkably, it includes the self-designation as “Americans.” “It is not the first time,” the protest letter states,
that ill–will and prejudice damaged the reputation of Americans and made them look as if they were unworthy of attaining any honors. This war was led against us since the discovery of America. In the case of the native Indians, one even questioned their ability to reason. With no less injustice it is pretended that we, born of European parents in this country, possess scarcely sufficient intellect to be human beings […] We have been excluded from the episcopal and other high ecclesiastical dignities and, in the secular sphere, from the first-rate offices in the army, administration, and judiciary. [Text 259]
This was associated with the demand that Spaniards born in the mother country had be treated as foreigners in Mexico. The Creole upper class of Hispanoamerica had increasingly developed its own sense of identity in the course of the 18th century. Resentment against newly arriving peninsulares – often less educated but claiming higher positions – intensified. In Portuguese America, too, the contrast between ‘Portuguese’ and Brazilians increasingly determined the course of events.
Growing discontent also arose in other groups of colonial society. The Andes were shaken by a multitude of peasant rebellions in the 18th century.
The spokesmen of the Creole elite often included local clerics. A prominent example is provided by the Dominican Servando Teresa de Mier (1763–1827), whose sermon on the Guadalupe feast of 12 December 1794 in Mexico – in the presence of the archbishop and viceroy – caused a scandal. Mier was subsequently banned from preaching for 10 years and sent to monastic arrest in Spain. The jumping point of his sermon was the connection of two traditions that were significant for the formulation of an independent – non-Spanish – Creole-Christian identity: the tradition of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Indian Juan Diego [cf. chap. 6.3] and the legend of the work of the Apostle Thomas in Old America long before the arrival of the Spaniards. It was not in the shadow of the Spanish Conquista and evangelization that the Gospel and the Virgin of Guadalupe came to Mexico. Rather, according to the preacher, this happened “already 1750 years ago,” that is, already in apostolic times – just as (according to Iberian local tradition) the Virgin had also appeared to the Apostle James in Spain at that time [Text 262]. So – and this was the decisive point – one could be a good Christian and still be against the rule of the Spaniards. Political emancipation was thus preceded by historical-theological emancipation.
Notes to Chapter 9
Daniels (2014), Kongolese Christianities in the Americas, 219; Dussel (1992), Church in Latin America, 75.
Meier (2018), Ränder, 258.
Tavárez (2017), Indigenous Christianities, 5(ff).
Konetzke (1991), Süd- und Mittelamerika I, 273; vgl. Gründer (1988), „Jesuitenstaat“, 10 ff.
González/ González (2007), Christianity in Latin America, 105–112.
Further Reading for Chapter 9
9.1 (The Church in the Colonial City)
Burkholder/ Johnson (1994), Colonial Latin America, 113 ff.285 ff; Keen (1996), Latin America, 120 ff.148–152; González/ González (2007), Christianity in Latin America, 74 ff.86 ff; Cushner (2000), Jesuits in Colonial America, 92–119; Dussel (1992), Latin America, 53–80; Garrard-Burnett/ Freston / Dove (2016), Religion in Latin America, 160–172; Mills/ Taylor (1998), Documentary History, 153–262; Merrim (1999), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Pietschmann (1994), Handbuch I, 505–510; Thomas (1994), Das portugiesische Amerika, 597–662; Terraciano (2014), Early Latin America, 335–352; Osterhammel (20), Colonialism, 88–92.
9.2 (Native American and Mestizo Voices)
Thiemer-Sachse/ Kunzmann (2004), Guamán Poma de Ayala; Prien (1978), Geschichte, 221–228 (Poma de Ayala); Hamilton (2009), Guaman Poma; Adorno (2000), Writing and Resistance; Meier (2018), Ränder, 219 ff.225–232; Steiner (1992), Poma de Ayala; Dilke (1978), Letter to a King; Mills/ Taylor (1998), Documentary History, 153–164; Adorno (2000), Writing and Resistance; Tavárez (2017), Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America; Fane (1996), Converging Cultures; Nebel (2006), Indigen-christliche Autoren im kolonialen Mexiko, 142–161; Lockhart (1992), Nahuatl Accounts; Christensen (2014), Translated Christianities; Lindenfeld (2021), Indigenous Experience, 31–49; Merrim (1999), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
9.3 (Jesuit Reductions [1609–1768])
Dussel (1992), Church in Latin America, 351–362; Prien (2013), Latin America, 186–197; Cushner (2000), Jesuits in Colonial America, 118–123. 164ff; Caraman (1976), The lost paradise; Gründer (1988), „Jesuitenstaat“, 1–25; Hartmann (1994), Jesuitenstaat; Meier (2018), Ränder, 234 ff.313 ff; Meier (1998), Chiquitos-Reduktionen, 117–131; Hoornaert (1982), Brasilien, 112–121; Lippy/ Choquette/ Poole (1992), Americas, 98–100.
9.4 (On the Eve of Independence)
Bakewell (22004), History of Latin America, 285–318. 368–376; González/González (2007), Christianity in Latin America, 109–114; Prien (2013), Latin