Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Texts and Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan (review)

Abstract

Reviews NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 176 Reviews KELLY S. MCDONOUGH Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Texts and Religion in Colonial Central­ Mexico and Yucatan by Mark Z. Christensen Stanford University Press, 2013 IN 1539 Don Carlos Ometochtzin, a native lord of the Nahua altepetl of Texcoco, was found guilty by the Spanish Inquisition as a “heretical dogmatizer” and subsequently burned at the stake. Among his missteps, Don Carlos purportedly had the (fatal) audacity to question why, if the Catholic faith exhibited so many variations, could pre-Hispanic religious beliefs and practices not peacefully coexist alongside Christianity? Whereas Indigenous deviation from the supposed “one true faith” was often couched in terms of willful disobedience, or mental and moral deficiencies that rendered natives unable to truly understand and accept Christianity, Don Carlos’s line of questioning suggests that a uniform version of Catholicism in colonial Mesoamerica was perhaps a theory but clearly not a practice. In Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Texts and Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan, ethnohistorian Mark Z. Christensen demonstrates that this was indeed the case. Through a skilled comparative analysis of seventy-one published and unpublished Nahuatl- and Maya-language sources representing more than three hundred years (1546–1855), Christensen successfully provides definitive documentary evidence of not only the existence of various Catholicisms, but also the distinct ways in which Nahuas, Mayas, and Spaniards created, prescribed, and reflected the Christian message(s) at local and regional levels. The sources include a wide variety of native-language ecclesiastical texts— books of Christian doctrine, confessional manuals, sermons, religious dramas , testaments, and sacramental manuals—which are organized according to three major categories: Category 1: “published ‘official’ texts written by ecclesiastic authors and/or their aides intended for a broad readership of both ecclesiastic and native populations”; Category 2: “unpublished texts written by ecclesiastics or their supervised stewards for more local audiences, including religious authorities”; and Category 3: “unpublished, unofficial texts written by natives for natives . . . with minimal or no ecclesiastic supervision ” (88). This last category, represented by two Nahuatl-language texts and eight in Maya, is one of the more fascinating aspects of the study. In chapter NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Reviews 177 6, Christensen analyzes two Category 3 documents, one Nahuatl-language (The Conversion of Paul) and another in Maya (The Creation of Adam) both of which exemplify unique Indigenous understandings of Christianity as well as “the possibility for ecclesiastical texts to contain heretical messages” (211). Nahua and Maya Catholicisms builds on Louise Burkhart’s pioneering research that illuminated the influence of Nahua culture on Catholicism during the colonial period (Slippery Earth, 1989). Christensen significantly advances the field through an innovative comparative approach that seeks to understand the same for Maya culture, and to bring Nahuatl and Maya texts into conversation. Here it should be noted that while increasingly scholars are attempting to take on Indigenous language sources, few have worked with two very different Mesoamerican Indigenous languages—Christensen definitely raises the bar. Throughout the book, the juxtaposition of precontact religious and cultural practices of Nahuas and Mayas, their markedly different local and regional contexts, the ideological differences among religious orders, and even individual personalities and skill sets, serve to explain the variations among the religious texts and thus the plurality of the religious messages that circulated. The result is a highly complex picture of the differences and similarities between these two Indigenous groups, not to mention among the religious orders with whom they interacted. An important outcome of this study is the negation of a particularly pernicious idea about Indigenous peoples in colonial Latin America—that of a singular “Indian” experience with Christianity, one that is more often than not understood (at least by the general public) as the Catholic faith being forced on a passive mass of helpless folk. In Christensen’s rendering, however, Indigenous peoples are shown to be active protagonists who both shaped and responded to the colonial religious and social world in creative ways. This last point is one of the stronger aspects of the work: with his ability to navigate multiple languages and cultures, Christensen never loses sight of the integral role of natives in the production of religious texts he examines...