Nahua and Maya Catholicisms, Texts and Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan by Mark Z. Christensen (review)

Mark Christensen elaborates here on a fine array of Catholic liturgical texts, confessional guides, and baptismal guides composed, preached, and disseminated by the mendicant orders throughout the colonial period in the major Mesoamerican indigenous languages of the Nahuatl and Maya. The texts were taught and assimilated in two distinct geographical areas and from two highly differentiated cultures: the Nahuas of Central Mexico and the Maya of Yucatan. Furthermore, this cultural-geographical divide also serves the author to both distinguish and highlight the degree of impact of, absorption of, and interpretations of Catholicism(s) by the indigenous populace (p. 48). A complex variation existed in the immersion of Catholicism among the indigenous groups, primarily between centers and peripheries (p. 17).

The book is divided into three parts: “Creating Catholicisms,” “Prescribing Catholicisms,” and “Reflecting Catholicisms.” However, the major contribution of this book is in the distinction among three types of texts: Category 1 texts, which are “printed religious texts written by ecclesiastic authors and/or their religious aids and aimed for a broad readership of both ecclesiastic and native populations” (p. 53); Category 2 texts, which are “unpublished texts written by ecclesiastics and/or their native stewards for more local audiences including religious authorities” (p. 80), and Category 3 texts, which are “unpublished, unofficial texts written by natives for natives” (p. 84). The genre of the testaments, as primary sources for the study of the degree of spiritual accommodation of Catholicism in the indigenous mind and soul to their day of death (chapter 7), were, however, overwhelmingly both monolithic and formulaic in their nature, and their contents were largely dictated by the local priest, via the notary, to the testators. Therefore, such sources do not really serve well the scholarly efforts of trying to identify spiritual dynamics or progress, as the rest of the sources studied here.

These category classifications, however, raise questions. First, there is doubt whether any broad readership of religious Catholic texts existed among the native populations, except for the very few among the postconquest Aztec nobility who were brought up in the Franciscan and Dominican convents. Second, with regard to the Category-3 texts, Christensen rightly observes that there were “various Catholicisms” (p. 13)—that is, that the indigenous populace were able to, and indeed did, create differential, autochthonous versions of Catholicism such as the well-known Maya Chilam Balam Books (codices) of the late-seventeenth century. Christensen acknowledges that scholars working lately with parallel texts in indigenous languages, have reinterpreted indigenous responses to Christianity and highlight the close protection and renewal of complex spiritual tenets. However, regarding the major Nahua text cited, the Vision of Saint Paul (p. 197), he writes, “All such unorthodox elements originate from one of two sources … the above derives from the tale’s inclusion of Nahua-specific elements into the account. The second stems from misrepresentations of the biblical and medieval accounts” (p. 208). Such “unorthodox intrusions” into the original version of such texts are, however, the most distinct marks of indigenous authorship to be found and should have been discussed further.

Some of the lengthy translations from Nahuatl and Maya (some of which have already been published elsewhere), although commendable, could have been either trimmed or moved to the footnotes without affecting this book’s complicated contents.