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The Invisible War

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Illustrations..................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments................................................................................................................xi1. Rethinking Indigenous Devotions in Central Mexico...........................................................................12. Before 1571: Disciplinary Humanism and Exemplary Punishment.................................................................263. Local Cosmologies and Secular Extirpators in Nahua Communities, 1571–1662.............................................624. Secular and Civil Campaigns Against Native Devotions in Oaxaca, 1571–1660.............................................1025. Literate Idolatries: Clandestine Nahua and Zapotec Ritual Texts in the Seventeenth Century..................................1246. After 1660: Punitive Experiments Against Idolatry...........................................................................1597. In the Care of God the Father: Northern Zapotec Ancestral Observances, 1691–1706......................................1928. From Idolatry to Maleficio: Reform, Factionalism, and Institutional Conflicts in the Eighteenth Century.....................2329. A Colonial Archipelago of Faith.............................................................................................269Glossary.......................................................................................................................283Abbreviations..................................................................................................................287Notes..........................................................................................................................291Bibliography...................................................................................................................337Index..........................................................................................................................361

Chapter One

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INTRODUCTION

On April 18, 1665, several nocturnal comings and goings took place in Lachirioag, a Northern Zapotec community in Villa Alta, a district northeast of Oaxaca City in New Spain. These activities were uncanny from the vantage point of Antonio de Cabrera, an African slave whom Diego Villegas y Sandoval Castro, Villa Alta's alcalde mayor, or chief magistrate, had entrusted with the task of reporting any suspect activities. Cabrera's owner, the encomendero of Lachirioag, was also in town, discharging his duties as collector of indigenous tribute. Cabrera's attention focused on several events that would have attracted little notice had they occurred at daytime or in an urban setting. He saw some natives enter the house of Lachirioag resident Gerónimo López late at night. They came in, passed two women at the door, placed a half real—a coin of moderate value—on the ground, and sat near two large pots in which deer meat simmered as a native stood nearby holding a reed shaft topped with a bloody rag, and another illuminated the scene with a torch. As Cabrera drew closer, one of the women cried out a warning, and everyone left López's house in haste. A week later, Cabrera came across López and many adult residents of Lachirioag as they came down a hill and approached the town center early at night. Cabrera later noticed that some people were once again cooking deer meat in two large pots at López's house. Even later, just before dawn, Cabrera went past this dwelling and surprised several natives who were dividing the deer meat among themselves; as before, they exited the house in a rush.

Even though these activities may seem innocuous when compared to the human sacrifices described in lavish detail in accounts of Central Mexican idolatries since Cortés's time, this African slave's narrative provided the Spanish magistrate with the quintessential first step for a juridical inquiry into idolatry—a vivid denunciation of suspicious native activities. Cabrera would eventually turn out to be a less-than-reliable narrator, but the main question facing the alcalde mayor was deceitful in its plainness: Had Gerónimo López and his associates committed an idolatrous act? If so, what juridical proof could be offered of their guilt? Following the legal procedure observed in both ecclesiastical and civil idolatry trials, the magistrate arrested six defendants, collected testimony from witnesses, and sought to obtain idolatry confessions from the defendants in a spirited trial held between February and April 1666. To Villegas y Sandoval's surprise, unlike most Zapotec defendants in a similar predicament, López and his associates did not cooperate in the collective construction of an idolatry narrative in the courtroom. Instead, they insisted that none of the actions they had carried out were idolatrous, and they impeached Cabrera's testimony by noting he had been caught propositioning local women. The proceedings ended on an unusually ambivalent note, for Villegas y Sandoval absolved all the defendants, warning them they should avoid "any ceremony that may be suspected to be idolatrous."

This case is, of course, highly unusual; not only did it involve civil rather than ecclesiastical justice, but it went against the dynamics of most other proceedings against native idolatry or superstition in Central Mexico, which often followed a predictable trajectory from discovery to conviction. This trial's unusual outcome and ambivalent depiction of the actions of the Lachirioag deer eaters—were the accused sharing hunting spoils or honoring a non-Christian entity?—force us to focus on seemingly pedestrian matters obscured from view by hurried avowals of guilt in other idolatry trials. Idolatry extirpators not merely sought to prove that a certain observable action had taken place; they also strove to adjudicate a mental state and convict on a crime of thought. Given such a burden of proof, idolatry as a legal and social category could only be willed into existence by the concerted action of accusers and suspects in a courtroom. Before indigenous defendants chose to confess that a particular action was indeed idolatrous, all their accusers possessed were suspicious ritual implements and troubling narratives proffered by witnesses. Colonial idolatry could be adjudicated into being only after accusers and defendants crossed this epistemic Rubicon.

In New Spain, the venerable Christian preoccupation surrounding the assessment of intentionality in a sinner's mind during the act of confession faced large linguistic and cultural barriers. The strange, fascinating—and, some interpreters feared, unknowable—motivations behind forms of worship in Mesoamerican communities posed a formidable challenge to Christian theological discourse and cultural categories, which turned to various reappraisals of pagan beliefs in classical antiquity during the ebullient intellectual climate of the early Renaissance. In Central Mexico, a unique aspect of the...