Death and Dying in Colonial Spanish America

2. Reading the (Dead) Body: Histories of Suicide in New Spain

53 2 Reading the (Dead) Body Histories of Suicide in New Spain zeb tortorici tucked away in the files of the Mexican Inquisition is a midseventeenth -century case of priestly suicide from the northern frontiers of New Spain that speaks to the conditions under which the clergy was working on the edges of the colony. In the early 1660s, a priest known only as fray Miguel, then serving in a New Mexican church of San Francisco, found himself in trouble with the Inquisition for heretical acts, including having held a funeral for a doll, acting irreverently toward the Eucharist, and soliciting women in the confessional. In 1663, fray Miguel hanged himself with a piece of maguey rope in his cell. Though suicide notes were uncommon until the eighteenth century, he left behind a brief letter stating what he owed and to whom. Interestingly, despite his heretical acts, fray Miguel was afforded an ecclesiastical burial. He, unlike most corpses of suicides, was buried in sacred ground by the priests who claimed that the marks on the body and around his neck and ears indicated that immediately after hanging himself he had a change of heart, struggled unsuccessfully to free himself, and was slowly strangled to 54 zeb tortorici death.1 This was taken as a sign that that he immediately repented and regretted his decision. This particular burial decision was intimately linked to the politics of proselytization and colonial expansion among the indigenous inhabitants of New Mexico. The priests literally read and interpreted fray Miguel’s body out of the category of suicides and thus gave him an ecclesiastical burial, in large part due to their precarious position, in a mission among the recently converted indigenous inhabitants of New Mexico: “since we are among recently converted peoples who would receive a poor example from seeing their priest be buried outside of the church.”2 The second reason given for his sacred burial includes the extenuating circumstances of having exhibited some signs of dementia (non compos mentis) prior to his death.3 This case introduces a topic, namely, suicide, that has not received sufficient study in colonial Latin American historiography . This neglect is especially striking given the number of recent studies on suicide in early modern European Catholic and Protestant cultures.4 Even among colonial Mexican suicide cases, however, the case of fray Miguel is unique in that it is an instance of suicide that, partially through the church’s attempts to obscure the realities of his death, was ultimately judged not to be a suicide by clerical authorities. The recording of fray Miguel’s death displays important commonalities and differences with other colonial suicide cases in the ways they are narrated, both through forces of governance (secular judicial authorities, the Inquisition, and ecclesiastical authorities) and through popular sectors of society (witnesses, family, and friends). This case offers us a clear account of the ways that authorities could report a suicide story in different ways, using various corporeal signs to indicate the state of the soul both prior to and at the moment of death. As Jack Douglas has pointed out with respect to suicides in the twentieth century, the officials that recorded and investigated suicide play an important role in the construction of its social meanings.5 Employing a reference set of twentythree criminal and Inquisition cases of suicide from 1564 to 1810, five cases of attempted suicide, one of recurring suicidal thoughts, and two exceptional artistic representations of suicide, this chapter looks for commonalities and differences that might display general Histories of Suicide in New Spain 55 patterns peculiar to New Spain, which at the time encompassed an indigenous population that was coming out of the terrific demographic decline of the sixteenth-century epidemics, alongside Creoles , Spaniards, blacks, and the racially mixed castas.6 Throughout, I’ve relied largely on the averiguación de muerte (verification of death) inquests that were initiated by criminal authorities to determine whether the death was a case of murder. However, due to the fact that some suicides and suicide attempts came under the purview of the Holy Office, the archives of the Inquisition also hold a number of files on the criminals and accused heretics who resolved to take their lives. This chapter is organized largely around the central questions of burial and resistance, and uses case studies as the building blocks of its arguments that individuals, authorities, and historians narrativize suicide...