San Diego de Pamatácuaro: A Mountain Shrine in Colonial Mexico

Abstract

This chapter examines the apparent contradiction surrounding a shrine in a small mountain town in western Mexico after Spanish contact. The residents of a wholly and monolingually indigenous town, Pamatacuaro, erected a shrine to their town’s patron saint, San Diego. The shrine was at least in part a propitiation for succor in the face of epidemic disease and colonial predation. Yet it had no formal approval from the diocese and the town never had a resident priest. The shrine, then, took on a life of its own—a place where indigenous people claiming Catholicism as their official religion sought the favor of a Catholic saint even as the lived religion of the region was a synthesis of Spanish Catholicism and Purepecha animism. As such the shrine occupied an intermediate space in a network of cultural, political and spiritual exchange and transit.