The Devil and Deviance in Native Criminal Narratives from Early Mexico

In 1686, Marcial de la Cruz, a Zapotec from the community of San Francisco Cajonos, confessed that he had murdered his wife, Catalina María, two years earlier. ¹ Tired of running from authorities, burdened with a guilty conscience, and concerned about the house and land that he had left behind, Marcial returned to tell his fantastic story. He recalled how on the day of the murder Catalina had convinced native officials from the neighboring community of San Mateo to release him from jail, where he was being detained because of a dispute over a mule. On the way back to San Francisco, Marcial stopped to bathe in the river, but Catalina decided to continue walking. After bathing, Marcial hurried along the narrow path to catch up with his wife, but she was nowhere in sight. Then, suddenly, a jaguar jumped out from behind a large maguey plant, poised to attack. Fearing for his life, Marcial commended himself to God and held out the rosary that he wore around his neck to fend off the ferocious animal. ² He picked up a large stick and struck the jaguar three times. As the jaguar dropped to the ground, Marcial heard a voice say to him in Zapotec "Cuckold, don't kill that woman," and he saw the jaguar transform into his wife. Stunned by this terrifying vision, he sought refuge in the convent of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca City. His flight from authorities would eventually take him to Mexico City, Puebla, Vera Cruz, and Chiapas before he returned to San Francisco Cajonos.

Marcial's account of his wife's murder reveals the extent to which indigenous beliefs and narratives could be recast in Christian terms. From the early colonial period, nahualism, the Mesoamerican belief that a person can transform into an animal, fire, or meteor, had come to be regarded as a manifestation of the Devil's manipulations. ³ According to Marcial, it was his rosary and his trust in God that enabled him to combat his wife's nahualli (Nahuatl, animal form, also a type of transforming sorcerer). Whereas Marcial attempted to provide a credible story to justify the murder, Spanish lawyers involved in the case dismissed his account as "irrational," "impossible," and nothing more than "diabolical superstition." Yet for Marcial and other native defendants and witnesses who testified in criminal cases, the Devil's machinations served to explain discord and disharmony. Thus, even as the Devil began to lose power in the mind of a number of Spanish ecclesiastics and administrators by the late seventeenth century and was demoted to a mere "superstition," he continued to be seen by Marcial as a destroyer of social relations, as one who deludes and corrupts. ⁴

This article examines thirteen criminal cases from indigenous communities of central Mexico and Oaxaca in which native defendants attributed their devious acts to deception by the Devil. Testimony from the trials illustrates how people associated the Devil with jealousy, sexual tension, drinking, and violence. I will also consider how the Devil who appears in trial records corresponds to the supernaturals of native-language texts, including the tlacatecolotl (Nahuatl, a type of sorcerer, literally, "owl person") and tzitzimitl (Nahuatl, a lesser deity associated with the western sky that could return to earth to torment people). ⁵

Recent scholarship on colonial Latin American religion has shown that there were multiple understandings of the Devil. ⁶ These studies rely primarily on church-sponsored texts and Inquisition records, but rarely consider mundane archival documents. The statements of indigenous defendants and witnesses in colonial criminal records represent the spontaneous words of common people, rather than the speech of educated nobles who contributed to the production of formal texts under the supervision of friars. By comparing references to the Devil in archival documents with descriptions of antisocial and immoral behavior in formal native-language sources, I consider how ordinary indigenous men and women imagined...