“To Lose One’s Soul”: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596-1669

Abstract

On 28 April 1598, Juan Bautista, slave of Regidor Cristóbal Jiménez, denounced himself to the commissary of the Inquisition in Puebla, Bartolomé Márquez de Amarilla.1 In his testimony, Juan recounted the events of the previous day: Around 4 PM, his master harshly beat him in the stable of his textile workshop (obraje) because Juan had not finished the work he had been assigned. Unhappy with his slave’s pace, the master applied hot pitch to Juan’s wounds and continued to beat him while two other men firmly held Juan down. In an attempt to appease Jiménez, Bautista begged him to stop “for the sake of the love of God and Holy Mary.” His torturer replied, “I beat you for the sake of God and Holy Mary!” and forced a firebrand into his mouth. Seeing himself so afflicted, Juan shouted, “I renounce God!” (reniego de Dios) twice, and was beaten again by his master. The next day, “after recovering consciousness (volviendo en sí ),” Juan asked the Inquisition’s official for mercy, insisting he was a Christian and begged for a transfer to another location so that his soul would not be damned.2More than 60 years later, in 1661, the black slave Nicolás Bazán rendered to the Inquisitor Francisco Estrada a terrible account of the violent work regime that reigned in the Coyoacán textile mill of his master Melchor Díaz de Posadas. As an example of the cruelty of Melchor Díaz, Bazán described the gargantón, an instrument that was a combination of collar and handcuffs used to immobilize slaves for days at a time. The chastisement it inflicted was so rigorous, Nicolás assured the Inquisitor, that “any Christian [would be] in great danger of renouncing God and His just faith”—something he actually did, according to other witnesses. He implored the Inquisitor Francisco de Estrada on his knees not to send him back to the textile mill of his master in Coyoacán, lest he be forced to despair and “lose his soul” on account of the cruel punishment that was awaiting him. He concluded that the suffering in Coyoacán by “Christians redeemed by Christ’s blood at the hands of fellow Christians” was so painful that “not even among Turks and Moors was a comparable martyrdom endured.”3The cases of Juan Bautista and Nicolás Bazán are good examples of the circumstances under which more than one hundred slaves were held accountable for blasphemy in colonial Mexico, between 1596 and 1669. As victims of cruelty and mistreatment, black slaves renounced God and His saints to provoke the intervention of the Inquisition as a way to be freed, at least for a moment, from the harsh working conditions they endured. Sometimes they even succeeded in using their religious transgression to obtain a transfer to another location and a new master. In some of these instances, they deployed an ingenious rhetoric that transformed the “legitimate” punishment of slaves by masters into torture, chastisement into martyrdom, and their own blasphemies into painful reactions of persecuted Christians. Moreover, by claiming to “lose their souls” at the hands of the owners of their bodies, black slaves also undertook an inversion of the colonial discourse that justified slavery by predicating the Christian salvation of African souls upon the servitude of their bodies.4 As both property and human beings, Afro-Mexican slaves learned quickly that they could be Christians and still remain in human bondage. This could not be clearer than at the moment of punishment. While slaves asked their owners to stop beating them for the sake of a God who commanded charity and fraternity to believers, masters put it clearly that in a hierarchical society in which slaves were at the bottom, the same God sanctioned that their bodies be answerable for all their crimes; indeed, some masters justified their cruelty by saying, “I beat you for the sake of God and Saint Mary.” Corporal punishment represented the currency in which black slaves, mulattoes, and other people of “low” caste had to pay for any legal transgression. Nominal fines as punishments for similar misdeeds were normally reserved to the transgressing Spaniards.5 In light of this conspicuous contradiction between mar ginality and integration, it would be reasonable to argue that the use of blasphemy by Afro-Mexicans was both a rejection of the Christian moral order that legitimized slavery and an attempt to survive a violent regime by claiming a Christian identity.In Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson offered a poignant analysis of the painful dialectics of inclusion and exclusion endured by slaves in societies that embraced the Christian doctrine of salvation: “The slave, in the city of the Christian God, was declared an insider, an integral part of the brotherhood of man in the service of God; but the slave, in the city of man, remained the archetypical outsider, the eternal enemy within, in a formalized state of marginality.”6 As Patterson argues, slaves were never assigned to the status of outcasts, but instead they were pushed (not without anxiety) to the margins of society. With slaves in this state of secular excommunication, slaveholders drew their authority from their control of symbolic instruments such as the “symbolic whip” of religion. This control persuaded slaves to believe, Patter-son contends, “that the master was the only mediator between the living community to which he belonged and the living death that his slave experienced.”7Several blasphemy trials, however, show that Afro-Mexicans were sometimes able to turn this “symbolic whip” against their own masters and hold them accountable for the possible condemnation of their souls. Stemming from unbearable chastisement in the city of man, blasphemy extended a bridge to the city of God, where slaves could occasionally find leverage against their masters with the help of the Inquisition. In general, the Mexican Holy Office was very lenient towards violent slaveholders, normally condemning slaves to severe beatings for alleged religious transgressions. Part of the reason for the Inquisition’s biased attitude undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that the Holy Office, and the church in general, were also major slave owners. More important was the determination of the Holy Tribunal to curb any sign of slave rebellion in New Spain, where Afro-Mexicans were feared and repudiated from the beginning of the colonial enterprise and especially during the period covered by this essay.Indeed, during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries serious concerns over the presence of too many slaves in the colony and the possibility of slave rebellions frequently transpired in letters and reports written by royal administrators.8 As early as 1537, New Spain experienced the first of several attempts of slave rebellion. On the roads of New Galicia, Guanajuato, Pénjamo, San Miguel, and the highway between Puebla and Veracruz and along the Pacific Coast, active bands of cimarrones (runaway slaves) robbed and killed Indians and Spaniards throughout this period. In the mountains near Orizaba, a Congolese chief called Yanga established an almost impenetrable palisade, raiding the neighboring pueblos and haciendas with impunity for more than 30 years until the settlement was subdued in 1609. By the second decade of the seventeenth century the importation of slaves, now in the hands of Portuguese traders, reached its highpoint, further fueling the already strong fear of an urban slave uprising. After an aborted rebellion in 1608 in Mexico City, the colonists faced a new threat in 1611, when an angry crowd of 1,500 blacks belonging to the Cofradía de Nuestra Señora filed past the viceregal palace and the Palace of the Inquisition, carrying the corpse of a female slave who had been flogged to death by her master. The rebellion was quickly repressed, with 36 blacks, 7 women included, publicly hanged in the plaza mayor of the city, and their heads were placed on pikes. Numerous minor revolts were registered in the following years in the ranching regions of the northern New Spain and in the vicinity of Veracruz, while Mexico City itself experienced a new scare in 1665. Working as an important instrument of colonial vigilance, the Inquisition had detected in that year new signs of unrest among the Afro-Mexicans of the capital. In the end, the alleged conspiracy never materialized, but the ensuing constant patrols by the Spanish infantry and militia were a clear proof of the racial tension existing in the colony.9While one may not assert that black-white relations were always abrasive, it is clear that Afro-Mexicans tended to arouse feelings of fear rather than sympathy or even compassion in Spaniards. The obvious difficulty of meeting Spanish standards of civil security, and of fulfilling economic needs at the same time, produced harsh legal measures meant to control the increasing black population and forestall slave revolts. This only made slavery more unpalatable, at times leading to new rebellions, which, in turn, confirmed the need for vigorous suppression. In this circular process of fear and repression, colonial authorities tended to tolerate the brutality of the masters. Indeed, the lash, the stock, the pillory, the use of gags and leg irons, and the practices of branding, burning, and even mutilating slaves evidenced the de facto power held by the slaveholders in New Spain.Although it was assumed that violence had a key role in maintaining and creating slavery as a relation of dominance, it was not settled how far a master was allowed to go in his disciplinary actions. Where was the line between “legitimate punishment” and sadistic mistreatment? In colonial Mexico slaves struggled constantly to set limits to this brutality both through institutional and noninstitutional avenues. Under Spanish law, mistreated slaves could ask for protection of civil courts, but in practice few slaves benefited from this legal instance during the first two centuries of Spanish domination.10 For the great majority of bondsmen, work slowdowns, maroonage, banditry, occasional outburst of rioting violence, and blasphemy were among the most recurrent strategies of resistance to abusive masters. Of these types of social contention, only blasphemy gave them access to the Mexican Holy Office where they could fight the vast range of impunity enjoyed by their masters by appealing to moral leverage as members of the Christian community. This strategy of verbal resistance was well known in old Spain, especially in centers of great concentration of slaves such as Seville. Hoping to spare masters the economic loss incurred when their slaves were taken to prison where they were fed and clothed at the slaveholder’s expense, the Catholic kings had issued a decree in 1502 allowing the master to punish the transgressor by publicly administering 50 lashes.11 The Inquisitorial zeal soon diluted this “respite” for the master, however, for the Holy Tribunal insisted on its jurisdiction to try the blasphemers.12 In New Spain, the Inquisition’s interest in repressing blasphemy at these times of slave rebellion occasionally worked against the very masters it was intended to protect. Forced to intervene by the slave blasphemers, the Holy Office not only undermined the disciplinary authority of the slaveholders but also permitted it to be transformed, by apt manipulation, from a coercive colonial institution into a protective shield against the masters. Undoubtedly, the stakes wagered by slaves in resorting to the Inquisition were always high.Throughout the colonial period, blasphemy constituted the most common crime for which Afro-Mexicans faced the Inquisition. In contrast to Spaniards, who frequently resorted to blasphemy as a strategy of masculine self-fashioning, a means of establishing one’s autonomy after humiliating defeats in gambling games, and a verbal resource to make strong statements in honor disputes, Afro-Mexicans generally used blasphemous speech as a strategy of resistance and survival under unbearable working and living conditions as bondsmen.13 Indeed, although many of the defendants were free blacks, slaves seem to have represented the overwhelming majority, which suggests a direct relationship between this state of human bondage and the uttering of expletives judged to be sinful (only 3 cases out of 105 involved free mulattos). In most cases, the accused was a young male slave, while their female counterparts faced the Inquisition with less frequency (18 cases).14 Although this information is not always provided, the available evidence suggests that the majority of Afro-Mexican slaves tried by the Holy Office between 1596 and 1669 tended to be either creole (acculturated) black slaves (20), or mulatto slaves (21). While bozales (nonacculturated Africans) were rarely tried for blasphemy in this period (1), ladinos (Hispanicized Africans) were better represented in blasphemy trials (3).15 Most of the defendants inhabited urban settings, particularly Mexico City (35), and Los Angeles, Puebla (18), although Veracruz (1), Jalapa (1), and Celaya (1) were also indicated as places of residence. In the countryside, Coyoacán (4) and Amilpas (2), registered the highest number of cases, while Cholula, Tlanepantla, the mines of Zacatecas, and Misquiguala presented only one case each for the whole period. Although many of the slaves were employed as domestic servants, a significant number of all cases involving Afro-Mexican slaves took place in obrajes (21) in Mexico City, Los Angeles, Coyoacán, and other urban areas.16 Both in urban and rural zones, blasphemy was the result of excessive punishment meted out by masters for their slaves’ putatively delinquent behavior. Failure to finish work assigned, pilfering, and flight constituted the most common grounds on which slaveholders harshly thumped Afro-Mexicans. Typically tied to a step-ladder (Ley de Bayona), firmly held down by other slaves, or even hanged in the air by both hands, slaves faced their masters’ anger; often times, in their attempts to stop physical punishment, slaves blurted out expressions of blasphemy and rejected God, which early modern writers on the criminal law of the church and theologians (such as Domingo de Soto y Francisco de Suárez) considered to be a clear manifestation of infidelity that warranted prosecution by the Inquisition.17For Spanish moralists, however, renouncing God was also an unbearable expression of ingratitude by a Christian.18 Indeed, through the Son, the Father had set men and women free from the slavery of sin, hence making of them, as one modern scholar of Philippine colonization has remarked, “recipients of a gift so enormous as to defy equal return.”19 As a result of this divine manumission, Christians agreed to a new slavery for, as Saint Paul wrote to the Romans, true freedom only exists in enslavement to God.20 Yet, for those who were real slaves, renouncing God entailed more than a denial of otherworldly indebtedness; it also implied a refusal of the Christian ideology that justified their subjection as slaves under the promise of future redemption in the Afterlife,21 and a rejection of the God who failed to perform as a “true Master” protecting His slave under unbearable circumstances of chastisement.22 “What is the purpose of believing in God, if He doesn’t help or favor me in these tribulations?” asked Gerónimo, the slave of Juan de Isla, in 1611. Slapped in the face for this pronouncement by the steward of the Cholula obraje in which he worked, Gerónimo kneeled facing an altar and roared, “May the devil take with him our Lord and our Lady! I renounce God and all His saints because I’ve been taken to this obraje.”23 A parallel case was offered in 1616 by the slave Isabel (Mexico City?), who asked in despair when she was cruelly battered by her master, “Oh my Jesus, why did you allow this to happen? … You’re not God!”24As the pain and exasperation of slaves grew under the whip of their masters, the rejection of the God who did not manifest concern about the tribulations of His believers acquired increasingly existential proportions. A descriptive approach to the verbal repertoire used by slaves while being beaten shows that there was a clear tendency to couple the renunciation of God and the Christian community (symbolized by the baptismal chrism) with the rejection of the slaves’ own parents, especially their mother and her nurturing milk. While in Mexico City Francisco uttered, some eight times in 1601, “I renounce the [baptismal] chrism I received and the milk I suckled!” Pedro, slave of merchant Amado Pinto of Mexico City, in 1617 renounced the father who “made” him, the mother who bore him, and the Holy Mother.25 In Cholula, Ambrosio Gutiérrez, in 1611, renounced the mother who bore him four times after he was slapped in the face by the steward of the obraje. Most noteworthy of all, however, was the case of Felipa, slave of Valeriano de Negrón in Mexico City, who was sentenced to 200 lashes after she confessed in 1607 to having renounced “God our Lord and His saints,” as well as “the mother who bore her and the father who engendered her, and the milk she suckled and the swaddling clothes (pañales) in which she was wrapped when newly born.”26 Under the dubious protection of a god who allowed his people to be beaten, it seems evident that Afro-Mexicans repudiated having entered this world as Christians and slaves or, more strikingly, to have been born at all if birth meant being a slave.Blasphemy was not a mere expression of anger stemming from pain or despair among Afro-Mexican bondsmen. It often had another purpose, “more subtle and material,” which Jean-Pierre Tardieu has defined as “moral bribery” and Mexican Inquisitors understood as “forcing a pact” (forzar un pacto).27 Indeed, facing the imminence of physical punishment, Afro-Mexicans threatened their masters with renouncing God. For the slaveholder this created an impasse; if he decided to proceed with the chastisement, he was morally responsible for the resulting blasphemies. Yet if he dropped the whip, he confirmed the efficacy of this strategy for escaping castigation and risked its repetition among other slaves. Although some masters suspended punishment and took their slaves in continenti to the Holy Office, the majority tended to react with increased anger to the dilemma set before them. Therefore, when on 3 June 1598, Antón threatened his master, Juan Ortíz, with renouncing God at the sombrero obraje in Tlanepantla, he was harshly whipped, and Ortíz explained, “so this wouldn’t set a precedent among slaves as a way to avoid punishment.”28 In the same vein, in 1598, Gabriel de Castro, owner of an obraje in Los Angeles, Puebla, yelled at his slave in a similar situation: “Dog! Do you think you can escape punishment in this way? I’ll kill you for this reason!”29 For Inquisitors, the slaves’ “conditional” utterance involved a great deal of premeditation, and was thus considered especially reprehensible as a sign of “trickery and deceit” (malicia y afectación) on the part of the slave.30In their attempt to thwart the strategy of their slaves, masters often imposed silence on them through a vast array of instruments that included not only gags, but also candles, firebrands, sticks, cords, hot oil, and the master’s own feet, fists, and fingers. The incredible brutality displayed against the slaves’ organs of speech seems to suggest, as Ranajit Guha has argued in a different context, that masters attempted not only to control the spoken word, but also to produce “a significant absence” of speech; that is, to force a prescriptive silence on the bodies of slaves by marking them brutally as an example and warning to other bondsmen.31 Exhibiting the cruel traces of their masters’ fury, Afro-Mexicans frequently faced the Inquisitors with swollen cheeks, broken or missing teeth, black eyes, burned skin, and bleeding wounds. Sometimes, slaves were in such bad physical condition that the Holy Tribunal ordered a cirujano to examine them.32 In such cases, it was not uncommon for Inquisitors to spare a slave physical punishment because the accused had already been beaten “extremely” (muy açotado).33Often enough, masters crowned their extreme physical chastisement with verbal abuse. The term most commonly used was “dog,” which slaveholders often employed as a prelude to a severe beating. To use an animal name as an imprecation indicates, as Edmund Leach has argued, that the animal category itself is “credited with potency,” that it is considered in some way taboo and sacred. Dogs derived their “potency” from the fact that, as “pets” and domesticated animals, they occupied an intermediate category between “human” and “not human.”34 This social limbo inhabited by dogs was similar to the status of social excommunication, or “social death,” that according to Orlando Patter-son slaves experienced as nonpersons in the master’s world. Indeed, incorporated at the margins of society, the slave was “neither human nor inhuman, neither man nor beast, neither dead nor alive, the enemy within who was neither a member nor true alien.”35 Francisco del Rosal, a sixteenth-century Spanish scholar, clearly saw the similarity between these two states. He explained that slaves were called dogs because, like domesticated canids, they were part of the family, though they constituted the vilest members of it.36 Yet, however marginalized slaves were in their masters’ society, they were expected to honor the Christian God as any other “member” of a slaveholder’s family. This explains why slaveholders expressed a strong feeling of betrayal, ingratitude, and outrage when the slave renounced God and became not only a “dog” but also a “heretical other”: “Dog, you’re a Christian! Do you know what you just said?” “What did you just say, ‘dog enemy of God’?” “dog of the devil!” “Lutheran dog!” “rabbi dog!” What seems to be implied in the use of perro, the most faithful of animals, to insult and debase slaves, is a situation in which slaves were perceived to have symbolically “changed loyalties”; hence the resulting indignation. Tellingly, slaves were often ordered, and even obliged, to confirm their membership in Christianity by renouncing the anti-God par excellence, the Devil, and his works: “Dog! It is the Devil who you should renounce!”37In spite of the masters’ horrendous punishment and the Inquisition’s condemnation, there is evidence that blasphemy was taught and transmitted among Afro-Mexican slaves as a strategy to prevent bodily harm. For instance, in 1599, Joaquín de Santa Ana told his master Don Carlos de Sámano in Jalapa that he blasphemed because a fellow slave, whom he had met in a prison in Tlaxcala, told Joaquín he could stop punishment by renouncing, as he himself had done. In fact, Doña Luisa de Valdés, the wife of Don Carlos de Sámano, related to the commissary of the Holy Office that in the nearly 14 years she had possessed Joaquín, he had run away and committed robbery several times, but that she had never heard him “go against the [Catholic] religion.”38 In another case, mulatta Gertrudis de Escobar assured the sadistic nun for whom she worked in 1658—shortly before being sold as a slave by her own relatives—that she learned to renounce from a slave called “Scorpion,” who was later whipped on the streets of Mexico City for renouncing God. As might be expected, prosecutor Andrés de Çabalça was outraged to hear that a ritual of public punishment designed to deter spectators from committing this religious offense would produce its repetition.39 Çabalça’s irritation stemmed from the fact that public retribution for blasphemy was not only supposed to manifest the outrageousness of the crime committed but also the fearful power of the justice that punished the blasphemers. Following traditional procedure, the delinquent was first required to dissociate himself from the offense by means of a public disavowal (abjuración) of his/her crime. Like other sorts of public apologies, this ritual was not only meant to smooth the reincorporation of the individual to the body of the faithful but also to restore symbolically power relations by showing that the culprit publicly accepted “the judgment of… [the Holy Office] that this is an offense and thus, implicitly, the censure of punishment that follows from it.”40 Next, the now “infamous individuals,” regardless of their gender, were conducted on a beast of burden through the “customary streets,” naked to the waist and bearing a gag and a rope, while a crier announced their transgression. They were then administered between 100 and 200 lashes. It truly was a moment in which, “social values [were] not so much inculcated into the subject as etched upon the subject’s body.”41 However spectacular this event might have been, there was always the possibility that the audience could subvert the original message and transform the intended pedagogy of repression into a pedagogy of resistance.42 Yet slaves did not need to attend to those special occasions to “learn to curse.” As an utterance normally stemming from unbearable chastisement, renouncing God was part of life under slavery, and its frequency must have reminded black slaves of the terrible living and working conditions they endured. In this sense, renouncing God bore a “legacy of voices,” a polyphony in each utterance, and by repeating this kind of speech, black slaves transmitted and reenacted a specific practice of resistance among fellow slaves.43 Contrary to what Inquisitors wanted to believe, it was not the particular utterer on trial who was “the origin” of the condemned expletives, but a shared and long history of mistreatment and exploitation.Renouncing God did not immediately provide Afro-Mexican bondsmen respite from the master’s hand. Like any other crime, one had to be first denounced for blasphemy in order to be prosecuted. In this sense, the social alchemy that allowed slave blasphemers “to do things with words,” as philosopher John L. Austin put it, rested not upon the slaves but upon their audience, who in denouncing them endowed the forbidden expletives with the necessary social force to warrant intervention by the Holy Office.44 Appealing to their own “religious competence” (generally their concern with the “honor of God”) to interpret and then report what was said to the Inquisition, denouncers constituted the real triggering force behind “blasphemy affairs.”45 Of course, the Inquisitors reserved to themselves the power to define speech violation, and to ponder the circumstances under which the crime was committed. As a consequence, there was always a gap between denunciations and prosecutions. Denouncers seem to have understood that their competence was in reality subordinated to that of the Inquisition, for they tended to use terms such as disparates (nonsense, absurdities), and disonancias (literally, discords, dissonances), instead of the more doctrinal term blasfemias, to report the verbal infractions of the slaves. Moreover, it was not unusual to consult with priests and confessors, the “specialists” on religious matters, before deciding to go to the Holy Office.46The slaves’ chances to be brought before the Inquisition were improved, of course, if beyond appealing to the master’s Christian conscience, they drew the attention of a wider audience. This strategy, however, represented a double-edged sword, because by renouncing publicly, slaves incurred the ancillary sin of “scandal.” In moral theology this offense was not “likely to cause a reaction of indignation and outrage, but something that provided occasion and incitement to the sin of another,” or as Aquinas put it, “something less rightly done or said, that occasions another’s spiritual downfall.”47 What censors most feared was the negative “pedagogical” effect renouncing could have on the “faithful ears” of the audience. In 1660, for instance, Nicolás Ramos, slave of Francisco López in Mexico City, was severely scolded: it was not only a crime for a Catholic to renounce God but also because a public renunciation was scandalous.48 This severe reprimand notwithstanding, it was obvious for slaves like Nicolás that public renunciation was sometimes a necessary risk to take in order to secure a denunciation.Surprisingly, a significant number of cases concerning slaves who expressed reniegos were initiated by the masters themselves, or by people related to the masters, such as relatives, friends, and employees (37 cases). This fact becomes striking because there were multiple disadvantages for the owner in doing so: spending time and money taking his slave to the Holy Office, paying for the stay of his slave in prison, losing his/her labor power during the time in jail and, if it was so ordered by the Inquisition, selling their own slave. In addition, since sellers were obliged to declare their bondsmen’s conduct, an unruly slave with a criminal record, a drunkard, runaway, thief, fornicator, blasphemer, or at the audiencia or the Holy Office could decrease in market value, thus representing a source of economic loss for the slaveholder.49 Pending a lengthy trial, the costs of keeping a slave in prison could be indeed exorbitant. At a time when the price of a young male slave ranged between 300 and 500 pesos, for example, silversmith Juan de Padilla of Mexico City had to pay 158 pesos in 1658 for the year his slave Juan de la Cruz spent in prison.50 Similarly, Juan de Campos, owner of a textile obraje in Coyoacán, paid 73 pesos in 1656 for an eleven-month stay in prison by his slave Marcos Bautista.51 Nicolás de la Cruz’s imprisonment for five months cost 46 pesos in 1658, and Licenciado Gerónimo Morón had to pay 48 pesos in 1662 for 166 days spent in prison by his slave Antonio.52 The amounts charged masters included not only feeding their slaves, but also for buying them clothes, giving them occasional medical attention, cutting thei