Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600-1800 (review)

The process of writing the lives of saints or would-be saints in Spanish America receives full treatment in this work. Transferring models of spirituality and reenacting them in the New World involved a tension created by the injection of "identity" to the process. Were the hagiographers appealing to a growing sense of "new world-ness" and writing for an audience that felt increasingly different from Spain? Or were they claiming saints for the Spanish motherland? Morgan shows that the authors' allegiances to their region, their city or their order, shaped the "model" of sainthood portrayed in their writing. Some criollos became increasingly aware of their "identity bind" (pp. 11-12), not wanting to be confused with other racial groups. These writers developed an "identity discourse" through the lives of the saints, inviting their readers to identify with them. Contrariwise, Iberian-born writers stressed their Spanish origins. But, hagiographies went beyond this simple pattern by incorporating local sources of pride and mixing regional features with clearly European models of spirituality ironically flowering in the midst of a majority of Indian subjects. The development of hagiography marked a cultural change worth underlining. It began to develop in the seventeenth century, and soon the bulk of all printed works in Spanish America was devoted to religious themes. Written in Spanish, they replaced the grammars and catechism treatises in indigenous languages.

This work covers the hagiographies that evolved around Sebastián de Aparicio (Mexico), Rosa de Lima (Peru), Teresa de Jesús (Quito), Catarina de San Juan (Puebla) and Felipe de Jesús (Mexico). Although born in Spain, Sebastián de Aparicio's saintliness was developed in Mexico and his life is depicted as deeply ingrained in Novohispanic values and society: a layman, an entrepreneur and an eventual semi-hermit, he kindled long-term popular worship. Some of his biographers preferred to extol his Iberian origins as well as those of the Franciscan Order. This tension was never resolved. Rosa de Lima's hagiography was directly inspired by that of Saint Catherine of Siena, while her spirituality was inspired by Teresa de Ávila and Luis de Granada. Some of her biographies were written to satisfy the interest of the Dominican Order, while others praised her criollo origins and the value of Spanish spirituality against the threat of Indian disbelief or even apostasy. She even became a guardian of Peru against foreign predators.

In the biography of Quiteña Teresa de Jesús, written by Jacinto Morán de Butrón, Morgan sees an expression of local pride as well as a defense of Jesuit spirituality, which she was assumed to impersonate. The need to demonstrate her merits vis-à-vis those of Rosa de Lima added to the local flavor of his work. Catarina de San Juan, who never achieved canonical recognition as a beata or saint, offered multiple challenges to her biographers, being an oriental woman whose dubious origins cast her in a lower-class social place. Her biographers had to reconcile her lowly status to the expected spiritual qualities of those chosen by God. The tension between her foreignness and her lack of social pedigree thus had to be balanced by imagined ancestry of royal blood. Yet, ecclesiastical authorities fought hard to suppress her devotion, rejecting problematic aspects of her assumed sanctity. The hagiographic construction of the identity of Felipe de Jesús, martyred in Japan, was plagued by the fact that he could not be proven to be of Novohispanic origin, and that late Bourbon policies were increasingly anti-criollo. Criollos fiercely claimed him as Mexican while Spaniards argued for his Iberian origins. This controversy became a key feature of de Jesús's many hagiographical depictions through the nineteenth century.

In his conclusion Morgan seems to retreat some from his own analytical theses and reminds the reader...