El cristianismo en el espejo indigena: Religiosidad en el occidente de la Sierra Gorda, siglo XVIII (review)

Over the last fifteen years, several works have consistently raised the analytical acuity of a challenging area of inquiry: indigenous adaptations to the teaching and enforcement of orthodox Christian practices in colonial Spanish America. This inquiry has been bracketed, however, by the fragmentary nature of ecclesiastical or civil records relating to indigenous religious practices, and by the uneven survival of mundane documentation regarding specific individuals. Nevertheless, the unique descriptions of ritual practices preserved in trial records and doctrinal texts—alongside a small but significant corpus of ritual and devotional writings by Maya, Zapotec, and Nahua specialists—demand both sustained attention and a multifaceted approach. Accordingly, not one, but several approaches have given shape to this field: among the most relevant for New Spain, one could cite Alfredo López Austin's emphasis on persistent Mesoamerican cosmological beliefs, James Lockhart's contextualization of Nahua social life within long-term language change, Serge Gruzinski's examination of an emerging mestizo consciousness, Louise Burkhart's elucidation of early Nahuatl doctrinal texts, and William B. Taylor's exhaustive analysis of the rapport between local priests and their parishioners. Lara Cisnero's book—based on a Master's thesis honored with the 2000 Clavijero prize by Mexico's INAH—continues an analytical conversation on man-gods and messianic interludes inaugurated by López Austin, Gruzinski, and Taylor. In fact, this work makes a twofold contribution: a contextualization of what may seem, at first glance, fascinating but unclassifiable instances of messianic native movements, and a diligent characterization of Sierra Gorda and San Luis de la Paz—a region comprising parts of contemporary Querétaro, Guanajuato, Hidalgo, and San Luis Potosí—as an economic and cultural crossroads where Otomi, Nahua, and African migrants mingled with relatively nomadic Chichimec populations.

This work's center of gravity resides in two comparable episodes: the accusations regarding unorthodox celebrations led by Francisco Andrés (a ritual specialist known as El Cristo Viejo) between 1734 and 1769 in Sierra Gorda, and by Andrés Martínez and his associates circa 1796 in San Luis de la Paz. These accusations may be linked to local struggles for social or religious supremacy. Accordingly, Lara Cisneros emphasizes the enmity that local cabildo members direct toward Francisco Andrés and former town official Felipe González in the context of public hostility towards local priests and Spaniards, and the shock with which local enemies of the Martínez family enumerate a catalogue of perversities—whipped images, toads atop altars, and unorthodox Masses. In spite of the author's contextualization—which includes an apt contrast between Franciscan and Jesuit evangelization efforts in the region, and an account of a local Spanish confraternity eventually turned over to native parishioners—the Cristo Viejo remains an elusive figure: a Protean cultist who eludes punishment for consuming peyote due to jurisdictional conflicts, and who is repeatedly accused of performing a simulacrum of Mass for local women that includes tortillas in lieu of the Eucharist, and his own bathwater imparted as a ritual beverage, a practice later imitated by Martínez. How may we explain local support for these two specialists? Lara Cisneros' response recruits López Austin's model of the colonial man-god—a local ritual specialist who exercised charismatic authority by appealing to collective notions of cosmological order based on memories of preconquest beliefs and local appraisals of Christianity. This exposition, which relies on Jacques Galinier's analysis of contemporary Otomi cosmology, remains open-ended, as it should, since only a small portion of the cultural context that motivated these apparently idiosyncratic ritual observances is accessible through surviving evidence.

In summary, this book is directed towards students of Latin American social history and historical ethnography, and it assumes the vantage point of a regional case study. Furthermore, Lara Cisneros' research introduces a comparative question that should...