Death and Dying in New Mexico

Abstract

The deathbed tells us a great deal about life. In Martina Will de Chaparro’s admirable study the deathbed reveals much about change in social relations and definitions of the public and the private. Will’s study begins in 1700, but the book’s core explores how ways of death changed in nineteenth-century New Mexico. Based upon the study of 469 wills (dated 1704 – 1899, one-third dictated by women), this book also utilizes burial registers, prescriptive literature, archeological findings, criminal records, and newspapers. Will offers thoughtful analysis of ideas, ritual actions, and material culture. Illustrations well exemplify the book’s central concepts.Dying women and men desired a “good death,” a mindful, orderly approach toward their final moments in this world. To help the soul win the struggle for salvation, New Mexicans prepared detailed wills, sought last rites, and planned for proper burial. Will stresses that a baroque sensibility shaped ideas and practices around death in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century New Mexico. While New Mexican deathways shared much with Spain and Mexico, distinctive rituals were common in this imperial fringe, especially before 1820. Colonial New Mexicans focused most on the soul’s journey after death and, by modern standards, little on the body. The cadaver required little care before burial; no marker designated burial place. New Mexicans instead preferred unmarked interment beneath the church floor. In 1800 nearly 100 percent of recorded burials took place inside a church. In New Mexico “wealthy vecinos, the indigent, Indian servants, and foundlings shared the space beneath the church” (p. 92), in contrast to the exclusive, hierarchical patterns common in central Mexico. New Mexicans of all types demonstrated a penchant for burial in the habit of St. Francis. Deathbed requests for such pious burials declined as the colonial era ended and the numbers of Franciscan clergy dwindled.Will recounts the protracted battles between church officials, local clergy, and laity over the place of burial. Directives for “ventilated cemeteries” began in the late colonial era, but New Mexicans pushed for traditional burial within the church itself. The remaining Franciscans squarely ignored these reform decrees. In general, “New Mexicans resisted Bourbon reforms of local religious practices” (p. 7). Conflict between distant officials and New Mexicans continued into the Mexican national period. (Will argues that the festering issue of burial location partly explains the causes of the 1837 Chimayó Rebellion.) The Franciscans’ replacement by diocesan clergy hastened change, and authorities won out. Cemeteries were established outside of town centers, eventually “exiling the dead” and ending a centuries-old practice of church burial. Will’s statistics show a sharp decline in church burials by the 1840s. Yet evidence indicates that the practice continued in private chapels, rural parishes, and, for the wealthy, in some churches.Will finishes her study by examining the unmistakable impact that Anglo businessmen had on deathways. The newcomers promoted among Hispanics practices common in the U.S. Northeast: coffins, embalming, and memorial portraits. By the late nineteenth century, the urban Hispanic dead seldom wore the Franciscan habit but rather had themselves encased in a coffin prior to burial in a cemetery well beyond the church. This fascinating chapter, which makes good use of newspaper advertisements, demonstrates the rapidity of change in urban New Mexico as local people began to follow ways from the eastern United States. (Will does not discuss changing deathways in Porfirian Mexico, thus neglecting a chance to continue this otherwise thoroughly transnational story.) Yet even in this era, change was not unidirectional. Will considers contradictory patterns in the nineteenth century: “As some sectors of society gradually moved toward a more secular way of dying and living, others embraced a traditional, baroque religiosity” (p. 62). In the end, Will documents rapid transformation in deathways, but change began in the Spanish empire and in New Mexico itself, and should not be attributed solely to Anglo influence.This generally strong volume has a couple shortcomings. First, readers interested in Pueblo religiosity will find relatively little here. Will focuses mostly on the “Spaniards” who, she acknowledges, had a mixed ethnic heritage. Second, Will uses published literature as evidence of mentalities. I question the degree to which print culture from Spain and central Mexico filtered into everyday life in distant, impoverished, and largely illiterate New Mexico. Will mentions a “rich oral tradition of sermons, stories, morality plays, and songs” (p. 18), but utilizes little such material.This readable study will interest scholars and students of colonial Latin America, the Southwest, and popular religion. The final chapter should also be shared with colleagues in U.S. history. Will directly addresses scholarship on death in the United States, rightfully reminding readers that “no single ‘American’ way of death has ever existed” (p. xix).