Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America

Chapter 8: Enlightened Reformers and Popular Religion: Polarizations and Mediations, 1770–1810

ChapTer 8 Enlightened Reformers and Popular Religion Polarizations and Mediations, 1770–1810 aFTer 1770 people aCross The BaJío lived new polarizations in an accelerating capitalist economy, challenges they faced in communities shaped by patriarchy and fragmented by ethnic complexity . They interpreted times of change and uncertainty through deep religious understandings. Everyone was Christian. Everyone recognized the Church. Yet the Christianity that had developed during three centuries came out of unequal encounters among Europeans, Mesoamericans, Africans, and their mixed offspring. By the late eighteenth century they lived a religious culture of many visions and voices. Most clergy promoted sacramental worship and moral sanctions . Rich testators funded convent capitalism, enabling priests and nuns to be mortgage bankers. Patriarchs at San Miguel, earlier devoted to a sharply penitential Catholicism, now turned to an enlightened, rational vision promoted by reforming churchmen and regime officials . Popular communities, famously the Otomí at Pueblito, kept cults of propitiation that promised aid and comfort in the struggles of daily life. All lived within the flexible boundaries of the church. Religion orchestrated common commitments and contested understandings . It linked people of all ranks and categories, powerful and poor, offering shared ways to negotiate changing times. Catholic 404 Forging aTlanTiC CapiTalism Christianity was hegemonic across the Bajío as the nineteenth century began, yet divisions deepened and debates escalated. The Bajío’s religious ways emerged from a long history. Sacramental Catholicism and convent capitalism came early, as did the propitiatory devotions that addressed everyday challenges from cultivation to curing. Penitential worship strengthened at San Miguel in the first half of the eighteenth century, just as Querétaro elites adopted devotion to Our Lady at Pueblito, long essential among the Otomí there. After 1770 religion still permeated every aspect of life in the Bajío and New Spain. Powerful entrepreneurs engineered profit amid drought, and believed that they were offering Christian charity. Landlords and managers called on the Virgin to end drought, while they worked to profit from it. The Otomí at La Griega refused to work in the face of plague, unless allowed a festival of appeal and integration. The diversity of religious voices and visions became more complex in the late eighteenth century. In the age of Atlantic enlightenment, reason asserted a new role in religious understandings. In New Spain reason rarely challenged religion; rather, it reshaped religious visions.1 It accelerated the emphasis on human action already evident in the penitential and charitable devotion promoted at Atotonilco near San Miguel. Reason supported the morality promoted by sacramental worship ; it honored the investments of convent Catholicism. And reason— Catholic, Christian reason—challenged the propitiations, cures, and sorceries at the heart of popular worship. To those who claimed the light of reason, propitiation became superstition, even idolatry. While commercial dynamism brought deepening social polarization, religious culture faced new divisions. Many among the powerful and their enlightened allies denied the validity and value of popular devotions. Difference deepened into polarization; cultural conflicts escalated, pitting an enlightened, reforming few against a deeply religious majority. Yet elites and reformers also debated how to mediate cultural and social polarization. Some argued for the necessity of popular devotion to propitiatory virgins, notably Our Lady at Pueblito. Others proposed to educate the populace away from “supersticions,” while offering worldly charity to cushion social dislocations. Into the first decade of the nineteenth century social and cultural polarization widened; debates about religion and mediation continued. Production, polarization , and social peace persisted, until unimagined crisis struck in 1808. enlighTened reFormers and popular religion 405 Religious Reform and Popular Independence The debates about religion in eighteenth-century New Spain seem clear, especially in Spanish Mesoamerica—the colonial society grounded in the indigenous communities that reached to the southern margins of the Bajío.2 There a reforming regime and established church faced a Mesoamerican population, mostly still speaking native languages and still living in landed republics. Parish priests remained key brokers. They negotiated with newly assertive regime magistrates and new teachers. Priests, magistrates, and teachers might dispute local eminence; together they promoted more rational, sacramental worship. They saw established community devotions, especially the festivals that combined local solidarity, propitiation, and alcoholfueled approaches to divinity, as disruptive supersititions.3 They faced resistance in demands for community control of worship, festivals, teachers, and even priests. Those contests limited reforms; local ways of worship usually persisted. In the 1750s the regime appointed reforming bishops charged with completing the long...