Identity, Ritual, and Power in Colonial Puebla

5. Power, Solidarity, and Diversity in the City of the Angels

91 chapter five Power, Solidarity, and Diversity in the City of the Angels On September 29, Puebla’s councilmen attended an annual mass in honor of Saint Michael the Archangel, and afterward four aldermen participated in a procession featuring the city’s official effigy of the saint. Councilmen had first commissioned the statue in 1617, and throughout most of the year it resided in the cabildo’s private chapel. On the evening of the feast day, the cabildo moved the statue to the cathedral to stand resplendent in the light of hundreds of candles. The annually elected patron of fiestas took great care in planning the commemoration for Puebla’s “first and principal patron,” the saint on whose feast day the city was supposedly founded.1 By commemorating the city’s anniversary on the feast day of Saint Michael, councilmen encouraged a civic consciousness while broadcasting their authority and affirming their status as imperial elites. This chapter focuses on the ways that Puebla’s public ceremonies encouraged distinct but interrelated identities. In colonial Spanish America, people fit within a social hierarchy determined primarily by race, lineage, and economic status, and public ceremonies did not function as social levelers. Through public ritual, people telegraphed their positions in the viceroyalty’s complex social hierarchy and at times expressed a degree of corporate autonomy. Indeed, the protocol of some public rituals even required groups to highlight their distinctiveness. However, while showcasing difference, ceremonies also cemented attachments to church, Crown, and patria chica. The city’s origin myth played a key role in uniting the city’s disparate groups, as did the related ceremonies in honor of Saint Michael. 92 · Chapter 5 But as this chapter also emphasizes, regidores played starring roles in almost all public ceremonies, and typically invited family members and associates to share the stage. So, consciously or unconsciously, aldermen used public ceremonies to forge useful ties and to reinforce “class” solidarity. Ceremony helped portray as natural colonialism’s basic tenets of hierarchy and difference. Historians have long recognized the importance of ceremony for forging a civic consciousness. Throughout history, leaders have played on historic myths and have “invented traditions” to encourage political unity.2 Edward Muir, for example, has shown how the sovereign of early modern Venice created a mystical aura of legitimacy by linking his rule to the cult of the apostle Saint Mark, who supposedly had a vision of the site of the future city while evangelizing near the Venetian lagoon.3 More recently, historians of early modern Spain have examined how urban leaders appropriated historic and defining moments in their cities’ histories to promote a civic consciousness. In both Seville and Granada, municipal leaders sponsored religious ceremonies that unified their cities under a shared, if consciously constructed, history of resistance to Moorish domination.4 But while promoting a shared history and a sense of poblano distinctiveness , Puebla’s regidores also made sure to project an image of patriarchal authority. Early modern Spanish subjects regarded family as sacrosanct, and intellectuals encouraged people to conceive of their local and imperial governments as large patriarchal families. In Puebla, councilmen acted like father figures, and while not always effective, they watched over the republic. Public ceremony, therefore, served to promote an overarching civic identity while underscoring the patriarchal authority of Puebla’s municipal leaders. Performing Ethnicity, Corporation, and Class Although public ceremonies encouraged people to identify as “Catholics” or “royal subjects” and, as we will see, “poblanos,” they did not subsume difference. Many elaborate commemorations not only provided space for different groups but required the participation of subjects from the full spectrum of Puebla’s ethnically and socially heterogeneous population. Spanish American ceremonies reflected hierarchical divisions based on race and class, codified into written law, but reaffirmed, validated, and sometimes contested during public performances. In Puebla, as elsewhere in the empire, councilmen made a concerted effort to integrate people, Power, Solidarity, and Diversity · 93 however unequally, into public performances. These reflected the veritable “pecking order” of colonial society.5 In both Mexico City and Puebla, overtly religious processions depended on the participation of all social groups. After all, God graced and judged all Catholics regardless of race or class. But even within the spiritual body of the church, not all had the same or equal function.6 Accordingly, Corpus Christi emphasized the unity of Puebla’s Catholics, but also the subordination of particular groups. Art historian Carolyn Dean has...