Translating Ritual, Politics, and Language in Colonial Mexico

By Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry

Reviewed Works: 

Jonathan Truitt. Sustaining the Divine in Mexico Tenochtitlan: Nahuas and Catholicism, 1523–1700. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. 281 pages. Cloth $45.00.

Ryan Crew. The Mexican Mission: Indigenous Reconstruction and Mendicant Enterprise in New Spain, 1521–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 305 pages. Cloth $99.99.

Daniel Wasserman Soler. Truth in Many Tongues: Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2020. 240 pages. Hardcover $84.95.

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INTRO

What images and ideas come to mind when we think about religious conversion? We may be drawn to culture, histories of the world’s religions, or to change in ritual practices. In the Christian tradition, the famous scene of Paul’s vision on his way to Damascus conjures up an all too classic trope of conversion. For many interpreters, religious traditions and their histories of contact with others, along with invariable reasons for conversion, are discussed in ideological categories. Conversion is a question of belief. The books in this review essay seek to challenge how we approach religion as a category, especially ideology. I locate each book into three facets: ritual, politics, and language. These are not original to the monographs, but they help frame the review essay and give context to their approaches to the question of religious conversion. In board strokes, these three books argue that conversion must lead to more than just ideas about faith because religion also contains ritual functions, political turmoil, and official policies on how communication. 

TRANSLATING RITUAL

Like other entries in this review, Truitt forces the reader to rethink the vocabulary of religious appropriation and ritual formation. The main intervention to the discussion of translation, conversion, and conquest is the difference between religion as ideology (or belief) and religion as practice (or ritual). Nahua religion and Catholicism were not the same ideologically. Countless monographs have shown their differences and non-commensurability, but Truitt argues they have fundamental similarities in the structure that sustains them. Sustaining the Divine makes for a remarkable case in the study of religion because it demonstrates that if we approach religion as an aspect of social function we can best infer comparative outlets to historical actors. 

It is worth mentioning that separating ideology and function, not to mention phenomenological experience, is done for the sake of academic interpretation. Nahuas and Christian misionaries did not separate these methods from their religious life. Colonial comparative works enumerating Nahua rituals, such as the team of Nahuas and Franciscans that spearheaded the Florentine Codex (1570s), may have addressed similarities, but ultimately challenged Nahua religion in idolatrous terms. The thorough examination of colonial Nahuas by James Lockhart (1992) dedicates an entire chapter to religion, and while Truitt certainly draws from his work, Sustaining the Divine presents a more nuanced approach. Truitt determines rudimentary details between the instruction of Christian doctrine one the one hand, for example, and instruction of music or drama, on the other hand. Both may have been part of Catholic pedagogies, but the latter resonated more deeply with Nahua cultural cues. 

The objective of Sustaining the Divine is to establish historical connections of religion that made their mark as important patterns of Nahua devotion to Catholicism through the colonial period. In particular, Truitt is invested in showing how Nahua ritual practices and Spanish Catholicism intersected by analyzing Nahua Catholic spaces and practices, mapping the way they acquired a life of their own. What makes this book significant, among many other factors, is Truitt’s presentation of the information through easy-to-read tables (there is one on Mexico-Tenochtitlan neighborhoods, fiscales at Nahua chapels, tribute and charitable donations, and Nahua testaments). For scholars working with archives and their holdings, these tables serve as a references that contextualize Truitt’s work, as well as for future analyses.

While the reader can turn to any chapter and access all kinds of features on Nahua Catholicism, I focus on Chapter 2 titled “European Pedagogies and the Nahua Populace.” The reader will also find noteworthy material on the contribution of Nahua women (Chapter 3) and Nahua fraternities (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 is divided into three sections that document the alphabetization process of the Nahuatl language, the instruction of music, and the introduction and appropriation of religious dramas. Keeping Truitt’s overall thesis in mind, that these practices were introduced by Spaniards but deeply shaped by Nahuas, Chapter 2 reveals the translation of ritual through function. Writing, music, and performance, which appear historically European, have in fact a long history in Mesoamerica that date to the invention of recorded calendars and festivals (Guernsey 2006; Rice 2007). 

Logosyllabic Mesoamerican writing is most famous in the Maya area as seen in monumental structures like stelae and stucco reliefs, but central Mexican communities were well aware of its representation as early as the rise of Teotihuacan who had interactions with Maya city-states (Sugiyama et al. 2020). By the sixteenth century, writing for the Nahua was not a new phenomenon (Boone and Mignolo 1994; Lacadena 2008; Zender 2013; Olko 2014). Truitt explains that Catholic doctrinal teaching was first attempted through pictographic documents, like Testerian catechisms, which were series of prayers rendered in ideographic images that captured the representation of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Quickly after, however, Nahuas and religious orders codified a way to pronounce Nahuatl sounds through Roman letters, even paring difficult phonemes that had no counterpart in Spanish (i.e. /tl/, /sh/, /kw/). Nahuas, like the religious orders who worked with them, became trilingual in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin. “Despite their decision to use alphabetic script,” Truitt writes, “some multilingual Nahuas chose to write their annals in Nahuatl, demonstrating their desire to adopt a part of the colonial enterprise without fully abandoning their traditions” (Truitt 2018, 87). Much of the detailed information we have about the Prehispanic period and colonial moment, came from collaborative projects between Nahuas and Spaniards who wrote natural histories, bilingual dictionaries, land wills and testaments, among other extant documents. Nahuas appropriated European writing to such an extent that they became instructors in mendicant monasteries and colleges, like Don Antonio Valeriano, who taught Nahuatl, logic, grammar, and philosophy at the College of Santiago in Tlatelolco (Torquemada 1615, 1:114–15). 

Music and drama were equally familiar to the Nahua who had developed a complex system of feasts and festivals based on a 365-day period. Known as the xiuhpohualli (literally “year-count”), Nahuas produced a total of eighteen festivals with musical instruments, processions, performances, and combat events. It is not entirely evident when the calendar began, certainly during the formation of chiefdoms and early kingdoms, but recorded festival dates in central Mexico trace back to at least the site of Xochicalco in the eight century (Elson and Smith 2001). Nahuas were familiar with wind instruments like seashells (tecciztli) and trumpets (tepozquiquiztli), along with percussion such high-sounding (teponaztli) and low-sounding (huehuetl) drums. After European occupation, “among the instruments they learned to construct were flutes, trumpets, chrimías, orlos (regals)…cornetts, bajones (bass viola)…guitars, sitars, and discantes (small guitars)” (Truitt 2018, 93). Music is one of the most important organizers of ritual formation and memory, as it engages multiple senses and has the ability to infiltrate deeply into human psyche. Truitt not only demonstrates that both Nahua women and men came to own European-style instruments, but also that Nahuas played them in mass, theater, funerals, and events that welcomed important people to the city-states. Nahuas were even invited to perform across the Pacific Ocean in the Philippines (Truitt 2018, 97). Along with music, theater became another outlet of Nahua Catholic devotion. And like music, performance via impersonation was also a concept that Nahuas understood well. Through the eighteen festivals, divine impersonators (teixiptlahuan) acted-out the attributes of the gods with possessions and regalia specific to each deity, from stonework to feather work and body paint (Bassett 2014; 2015). The performances involved both women and men, volunteers and city-state captives, and an array of temple and household specialists. Truitt establishes how theater became an opportunity for public religious expression where Nahuas were involved in the writing of scripts and actor and actresses performances. “The 1533 performance of the play [The Final Judgement],” Truitt determines, had “approximately eight hundred Nahuas that took part in the play…[and] the sixteen Nahua actors with speaking roles were responsible for their own lines, no one cut another person off, and the performance was the talk of Europe” (Truitt 2018, 105). Truitt concludes that Spanish officials in the late seventeenth century had observed divergencies that placed Nahua religious theater as genre of its own. Instead of underlining European customs, they were adapted to express Nahua cultural cues for a Nahua audience and by Nahua leaders (Truitt 2018, 107).

Sustaining the Divine is a book that tells a complicated story in the most accessible way. Nahuas adapted to European ritual because they themselves had historically rich ritual formations. By focusing on the power of ritual function, Truitt approaches colonial religiosity as a powerful encounter of religious practices, where acts not the ideologies, find their climax in Nahua Catholicism. While Truitt does not shy away from violent encounters that invariably changed Nahua perceptions of space and behavior, he challenges us to rethink their aftermath. It was Nahuas that sustained the divine through their collaborative projects of writing, music, drama, charitable donations, and membership to the Catholic church. 

TRANSLATING POLITICS

Ryan Dominic Crewe’s outline of the social construction and formation of churches in the midst of depopulation and perpetual epidemics positions the translation of ritual and language in its political context. The Mexican Mission helps us pause between Jonathan Truitt’s Sustaining the Divine and Wasserman Soler’s Truth in Many Tongues. If Indigenous communities like the Nahua in Tenochtitlan found the Christian religion compelling and helped to translate it into Nahuatl, what may have been the obstacles to this enterprise? Crewe highlights that studies of religion centered around doctrine and idolatry are often too narrow to explain the full model of mission, ultimately circumventing the intersections of colonialism and Christianity that are so lively presented in this book. The mission was not only a religious and spiritual enterprise but also an imperial one. 

Crewe’s work focuses on the experience of political turmoil, and while it is not a phenomenological account, it’s focus on experience as a lived reality is important. The greatest strengths, and certainly not the only one, of The Mexican Mission is its vast archival exploration of the General Archive of the Nation in Mexico City. Crewe connects the many webbings of early modern Christianity in Mexico by using petitions from Indigenous officials and missionaries alike, civil and inquisition trails, letters and viceregal accounts, along with published colonial chronicles and histories. 

While the reader will find careful attention to details across every page of The Mexican Mission, Part 1 on “Conversion” stands out for the purposes of this essay. This section reads in two chapters. One chapter on the category of religion as a justification of expansion that analyzes the growth of the Mexica empire (i.e. one of three communities that made-up the Aztec empire). The other covers the expansion of Christianity in central Mexico. By the early sixteenth century, the Mexica city-state of Tenochtitlan had secured tribute from a vast network of other communities, such as food staples, precious stones, ceramic work, lapidary work, feather work, wild game, and weaved clothing, to name a few. Evidence of this expansion was depicted in hieroglyphic reliefs like the Stone of Tizoc (1480s basalt stone, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City) and reiterated in colonial records like the Codex Mendoza (Bodleian Library, MS. Arch. Selden A. 1.). In the Stone of Tizoc, tributary communities were depicted by a captive held from their frontal scalp hairs, dressed in the regalia of their community, and with a toponym hovering over their bodies. Even if for dedicatory purposes, the stone depicted fifteen scenes of tributary transactions (Townsend 1979). The authors of the Codex Mendoza used the images of burned temples and the tributary products each community submitted. With some 52 double-sided pages the authors conveyed the extension, power, and reach of the Mexica empire. At the site of El Templo Mayor in Mexico City (the main temple of the Mexica empire), for instance, archeologists found ritual deposits of flora and fauna that belonged to the Gulf Coast as well as to the southern regions of Mexico and Guatemala (López Austin and López Luján 2017). Crewe calls this “imperialism” and “colonialism” but he is clear to emphasize that Mexica expansion had distinct rules and motivations for burning neighboring temples. In particular, Mesoamerican communities were not iconoclastic, demolishing temples due to an ideological sense of monotheism or idolatry.

Although more powerful Mesoamerican communities destroyed temples and images of deities at rivaling city-states, they did not do so for the sake of stamping out their veneration. Quite the opposite, in fact. These politics relied on consistent supply of tribute to maintain temple religion, which was accompanied by the institution of officials in subjugated city-states (Hassig 2001) and strengthened by marriage alliances. Mexica religion did not expand by means of conversion campaigns, where officials inaugurated the exclusive worship of Mexica gods, but as an extension of cultural appropriation from engaged communities. The Mexica would include new deities in their pantheon of divine entities, building smaller temples or a school of ritual specialists in their own temple precinct. In return, a subjugated city-state would be granted sovereignty under the empire. Mexica expansion gave city-states the opportunity to continue practicing their own religion, but it is difficult to imagine that subjugated city-states were happy to be become tributary centers. Spanish occupation and control was substantiated by the fact that they were able to acquire Indigenous allies against the Mexica empire (Matthew and Oudijk 2007). 

What makes Crewe’s comparison of the burning temple intriguing is his parallel of religious expansion. In the large spectrum of colonial operations, iconoclasm might appear insignificant, but it led to vastly different results of imperial growth. Christian colonialism equally required tribute through encomiendas, a forced labor system in a parcel of land granted to individual Spaniards. But local officials and missionaries did not share the appropriating aspects that characterized Mesoamerican expansion. Crewe highlights that conversion to Christianity came at a greater cost than subjugation to the Mexica empire. “While the destruction of idols,” Crewe writes, “signified a transfer of sovereignty and tributes to the conquering power in Mesoamerican politics, natives would soon learn that in the Spanish context it implied a far more sweeping, cosmic transformation” (Crewe 2019, 59). Instead of appropriation, exclusive monotheism and idolatry campaigns by the Christian religion required the complete annihilation of non-Christian deities and the restricted worship of the Christian god alone. It is important to note that campaigns of idolatry were undertaken not only by Christian missionaries and local Spanish officials, but also by Indigenous elites who had affiliated with the Christian religion. Soon after the abdication of Mesoamerican temple religion—in whichever territory Spaniards began to occupy—Indigenous elites sent their children to monastery schools to learn about Christian doctrine. “These acolytes,” Crewe describes, “functioned as a para-missionary group, a shock force that performed the friars’ disciplinary work of inflicting summary punishments intimidating recalcitrant elders, denouncing people—including family members and elders—for idolatry, and destroying all physical signs of native religion” (Crewe 2019, 71). The zeal of converts pushed Indigenous children to act as mediators and proxies of a different kind of religious violence, one that attempted to uproot the very fibers of their ancestral traditions.

Part 1 on the forms of conversion sets the stage for Crewe’s overarching premise: that Indigenous communities became Christian communities and used the church as a physical space and concept to prevent further violence. In moments of depopulation and great sickness compliance became the best option forward. “Indigenous polities relied on the stability that came with missionaries who were familiar to them, spoke their language, were predictable in their use of funds, and advocated on behalf of the community when necessary” (Crewe 2019, 217). In addition to the religious violence of conversion, readers will note the rich historical connections that Crewe entertains throughout The Mexican Mission. Crewe illuminates hierarchies of laborers and institution of policía (civility), building disputes, territorial battles between Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians, as well as the introduction of the secular priesthood (i.e. priests from non-religious orders), arriving to Indigenous petitions in the Spanish courts. At the conclusion of The Mexican Mission, Crewe positions veteran missionaries from central Mexico and anxious novice ones in a new context. This time in the Philippines. Named after Phillip II of Spain—a new region to intersect Christianity and colonialism—the Philippines became another trail of missionary work for people who had grown tired of fruitless efforts in central Mexico. Central Mexico became a stepping stone for expansion across the Pacific Ocean that created vast new networks of trade, ideas, and politics. Crewe’s new project, Sailing for the Chinese Indies, promises to continue that story. 

TRANSLATING LANGUAGE

The final entry in this review accomplishes what Truitt and Crewe have done for Nahua ritual and politics, but locates it among Spanish ecclesiastics. Truth in Many Tongues is a book that outlines the idiosyncrasies of religion for Spanish missionaries. Specifically, it focuses on opinions of language. Wasserman Soler argues that the Spanish Crown did not have a fixed agenda on whether Christian missionaries should use vernacular languages, or not, to translate Christian doctrine, sermons, theological commentaries, and related paraphernalia. Although Scripture continued to be the exception, he argues that official policies allowed missionaries on the ground to decide what was best, revealing circumstantial and practical choices on vernacular use. This is not to say that the Crown did not ban vernacular texts—it did. But where some languages were banned for Christian use, others were not, and were instead encouraged as was the case with Indigenous languages of the Americas. The scope of Truth in Many Tongues ambitiously contrasts missionary questions around the use of Arabic to determine how the Spanish Crown went about presenting Christianity in vernacular languages.

If we were to locate this book in religious studies, we might say it belongs to an intellectual history—it is concerned with ideas about language. It is neither a functionalist or phenomenological interpretation. But even for its focus on intellectualism, it nevertheless challenges dichotomies of belief. For those curious on the trajectory, Truth in Many Tongues does not reiterate Robert Ricard (1966 [1933]), who concluded that a “spiritual conquest” occurred throughout central Mexico. Instead the book is preoccupied with demonstrating that Spanish friars were just as complex as Indigenous peoples, and approached vernacular language use from different vantage points. I find this to be one of the most important interventions of the book. To maintain continuity with the overall theme of this review, I turn my attention to Chapter 4 on “Native Tongues and Spanish in New Spain,” which documents the decisions and aftermath from the Provincial Councils of Mexico from the sixteenth century (1555, 1565, 1585).

    The culmination to the Provincial Councils of Mexico, especially the one held in 1555, helps explain language policies in colonial Mexico. In 1524 twelve Franciscans arrived in Mexico City, led by Martín de Valencia, who was an experienced leader known for his work as superior of the province of Saint Gabriel in Extremadura, Spain (Wasserman Soler 2020, 109). More missionaries would arrive throughout the coming decades, not just Franciscans but also Augustinians, Dominicans, and Jesuits. That same year of 1524, however, Franciscans held their first Apostolic Meeting. Wasserman Soler points out that “Valencia advocated teaching Castilian [i.e. Spanish] to the natives. He argued that all clerics ought to take care to advance and propagate the Castilian language and ensure that the Indians know how to read and write in it” (Wasserman Soler 2020, 110). By not teaching Spanish, Valencia declared “they intend to disturb the best ecclesiastical government, which is impeded by so many languages that are so different, and they provoke idolatry, which is more apparent in the Indians that do not know Castilian” (Wasserman Soler 2020, 110). Valencia’s assumption to teach Spanish is what drives Truth in Many Tongues. Ecclesiastics like Valencia, whether belonging to a religious order or to the diocese, believed that non-Latin languages circulated idolatry because they could not convey the full range of Christian theology and doctrine. Spanish monolingualism also proved easier for missionaries arriving from Spain. William Hanks (2010) determined a similar case in seventeenth-century Yucatan. He concluded that Franciscans developed a type of “converted language,” in which Indigenous languages were qualified to convey Christian meaning, especially in ecclesiastical documents (Hanks 2010, 363). Disdain for vernacular religious texts may seem odd, particularly in intercultural contexts of conversion, but it deeply shaped early modern Catholicism, led by its response to the Protestant Reformations. Valencia’s story does not end with his initial admonition, however. Almost ten years later, in 1532, Valencia changed his mind. Recalling the deeds of the last decade Valencia wrote, “These brothers of mine were so learned in the languages of the natives…they were able to guide them and teach them to understand the blindness and error of their customs and ceremonies, offering them many sermons in the plazas and markets and wherever else they converged” (Wasserman Soler 2020, 113). Wasserman Soler concludes that individuals like Valencia, who changed their minds and may have changed their minds in the future, were not the exception but the pattern of the influential missionary figures of the sixteenth century.

    With Valencia’s stances in mind, the three Provincial Councils of Mexico continued to entertain the question of vernacular Christian texts. In 1546, Mexico became an independent diocese, separate from Seville, Spain, giving ecclesiastics more control over their own affairs, welcoming the ability to convene and make decisions that suited their own contexts. The Provincial Councils of 1555, 1565, and 1585 addressed various issues, but also their interpretation of the Council of Trent and the Counter Reformation that ensued in Catholic Europe (Megged 1996). In 1555 the Council approved the use of Indigenous language catechisms and sermons, but not before they were ratified by learned and trusted individuals who knew the languages. “Altogether, the bishops demonstrated suspicion regarding indigenous-language media,” writes Wasserman Soler, “but they did not advocate the use of Castilian to the exclusion of native tongues…rather than propagate one language over another, the bishops seem primarily concerned with ensuring orthodoxy” (Wasserman Soler 2020, 118). In 1565 the Council did not deviate from their attitudes towards Christian texts in Indigenous languages, but they did require priests to know the local language of their Indigenous parish. This was easier said than done. In Mesoamerica, alone, there are multiple language families and those families contain mutually exclusive languages and variants (Wauchope and McQuown 1968). This daunting tasks would require an overhaul of teaching by bilingual, if not trilingual, Indigenous elites. Such was the zeal by the Council, however, that “they allowed—in limited cases—a cleric to administer the sacrament of confession through an interpreter…Despite the less-than-deal nature of confession by interpreter, the Mexican bishops wanted to have backup plans for when priests and Amerindians did not speak the same language” (Wasserman Soler 2020, 121). More important, still, the bishops also permitted Indigenous catechists to act as teachers in the event that a community had little to no access to a priest. Indigenous catechists may have been the creators of documents like the Codex Mexicanus (BnF Mexicain 89-9), a Christian-Aztec ritual calendar from the 1590’s (Diel 2018).  The Council that took place in 1585 presented a loophole to vernacular Christian texts by stating that vernacular languages could be used if they were needed or could be done conveniently. The Council chose not to use Chichimec or African languages in their stance on vernacular evangelization. This proves Wasserman Soler’s point, that ecclesiastics chose if and when vernacular texts could be created, without a homogenous stance on the subject. 

Truth in Many Tongues presents a good ending to translation issues in colonial Mexico. “Churchmen could not separate language from other concerns, and thus they had to adopt a practical decision-making process that eludes binary categories [pro-Indigenous language or pro-Spanish]” (Wasserman Soler 2020, 128-9). Without excusing cultural discontinuity, violence, and contradictions, the book challenges us to think critically about Spanish friars who become linguistic and cultural polyglots. Looking at official documentation, like stipulations from Councils and the intentions behind bishops and ecclesiastics, is in many ways to ascertain what friars hoped would happen in the Americas. Truth in Many Tongues convincingly shows that one part of that campaign was to have a multilingual Christianity.

CONCLUSIONS

Each author approaches their case studies from different vantage points, the function of ritual, the experience of turmoil, and intellectual decisions about language that reveal intricate aspects of colonial history. Truitt demonstrate that much in his approach to ritual that establishes continuities in writing, music, and drama. It was the function of these social spaces of civilizations that permitted deep cultural connections for the Nahuas, whose only option to move forward without violence was to convert to the Christian religion. This is the premise that drives Crewe’s monograph. Focus on the experience of political turmoil as the determining factor that pushed Nahuas to Christianity is a way to assess how experience, certainly negative and positive experiences, shaped religious conviction in colonial Mexico. Nahuas recognized the concept of empire and political expansion quite well, so they understood their position during European occupation. But Nahua and European expansion were not the same. European colonialism came at a greater cost led by cosmic changes that attempted to bolster Christianity and eliminate Indigenous ritual practices. To this end, Wasserman Soler outlines the intellectual history of language in the conversion process of central Mexico. The book helps us reconsider how we view language policies, whether they were strict or not, pro-Indigenous language or pro-Spanish. Wasserman Soler concludes that the Spanish Crown was selective and practical on their stance towards vernacular language use in Christian texts. While the scriptures and mass continued to be exclusively in Latin, priests could write doctrines, theological commentaries, confession manuals, sermons, and explain the mass in Indigenous languages. 

    Thinking about translation as a category, not just of language but of ritual and politics, helps us analyze how we approach religious history. These three books provide an important framework for anyone interested in religious conversion, politics of identity, and ecclesiastical policies that were all entangled in colonial Mesoamerica. 

Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in Religion in the Americas. His dissertation, “They Give the Sun to Drink: The Life and Labor Nahua Ritual Specialists,” examines the ritual memory of ceremonial experts from the perspective of Nahua historians in the colonial period and material culture from temple and household settings.

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