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Between Nativitas and Mexico City Miracles and the Mundane in an Eighteenth-Century Pastor’s Local Religion Parish priests were more than spokesmen for official doctrine and institutional order; more than orchestrators of a universal liturgy; more than gatekeepers of the sacred in the face of exuberant or tepid popular faith. They carried their own accumulated religious experience, enthusiasms, and networks of affiliation, friendship, and knowledge with them into pastoral service. A seminary education, ordination, liturgical duties, and career ladder did not wash away all the personal habits of faith they brought to the priesthood. The devotional practices they knew from childhood; their preference for particular saints and representations of Mary, holidays, scriptural passages, prayers, places, and miracle stories; their talents and inclinations as public figures and practitioners of the faith; and their foibles and sense of calling to the priesthood all came into play. This side of pastors at work is not often documented in more than fleeting glimpses, but here is an exception—a more sustained account in one pastor’s words. It is largely the story of Francisco Antonio de la Rosa Figueroa, an eighteenth-century Franciscan friar of the Province of the Holy Gospel headquartered in Mexico City. The place and time are his period of service as pastor of the doctrina (proto-parish) of Nativitas Tepetlatcingo, an Indian pueblo about eight miles south of downtown Mexico City, during 1739–1740 and 1743–1745. Father de la Rosa’s account of his time in Nativitas and miracles worked through an image of the Virgin Mary he found there determines this focus. Composed in 1775 and 1776, near the end of his life, its tight lines fill both sides of twenty-two folio sheets. His labors, passions, quirky personality, and checkered career fairly spring from these pages of his shaky script as he relived his transcendent moment and acted on a desire to keep alive the devotion to this special image of Mary. 71 72 72 Part III There is more to Father de la Rosa’s account than I have presented in this essay,1 which I hope invites the reader into his story of Our Lady of the Intercession in other ways. I mainly address two features of the text that bear on his faith and activities as pastor. One is the bifocal vision of place and time in his presentation of miracles: Nativitas and Mexico City; and the 1740s events and the 1775–1776 composition of the text. The other is his view of Nativitas’s Indian parishioners—mainly as impediments or, at best, incidental witnesses more than protagonists in the story he tells of divine presence at work in the world. Father de la Rosa’s personality , opinions, and enthusiasms come through strongly in his text, but his parishioners are heard in it, too. I have given the parishioners a larger and different place in the story of local history and practices than he does by considering his treatment of them in light of other documentation about the community in the eighteenth century and other ways of reckoning with their activities. In discussing de la Rosa himself I have also reached beyond his own narrative to the record of his career that he would not have thought essential to the story at hand or how he remembered his life. The Pastor and His Text Francisco de la Rosa’s background and career take shape in scattered administrative records and glancing remarks in his text. Mexico City was the pivotal point of his life, even during his residence elsewhere in central Mexico. He was born there in 1698, the only child of Creole Spanish parents. His father and several other members of the extended family were traders and shopkeepers. His father eventually served as alcalde mayor (district governor) in two marginal districts, but was removed for misappropriation of funds and died in penury, in the care of his son. De la Rosa began his religious vocation comparatively late, and with two false starts, first as a Dominican novice in Mexico City in 1722 or 1723. He requested release from his vows soon thereafter, became a Franciscan novice in the Convento Recoleto de San Cosmé in August 1723, again asked to leave after four months, and spent the following year in Chalcatzingo (Morelos) studying Nahuatl with the parish priest. He was readmitted to the Franciscan novitiate in May 1725 with the understanding that his earlier false starts had been “without blemish of any kind,” and...

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