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  • Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico
  • Jeanette Favrot Peterson
Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico. By Jaime Lara. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Pp. x, 372. Figures. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00 cloth.

As a companion to Lara’s first book on the sixteenth-century monastic architecture of New Spain, this volume emphasizes the liturgical and performative activities that took place within the ambitious complexes built to Christianize and civilize the indigenous population. The author shifts his attention from the theological and artistic sources for the newly constructed buildings and their decorative programs, to a more compelling narrative of how these spaces produced meaning for their primary constituencies, the Amerindian neophyte. In describing the bodily enactment of Christian tenets and liturgical practices, Lara puts flesh on the bricks and mortar he so richly explored in his first book.

Taken together they attest to the author’s formidable command of the Judeo-Christian precedents for the evangelization of the New World as well as his astute analysis of the many points of congruence between European and Nahua religions that ultimately produced a modified Nahua-Christianity. Lara argues that these commonalities were aided by the innate translatability of Christianity’s message, honed through centuries of missionizing experience. Moreover, the multi-sensorial nature of Christianity’s ceremonial life dovetailed readily with the love of pageantry in the Americas; both religious traditions relied on a heady mix of images, song, dance, and theater to communicate and persuade. At the heart of his study, Lara painstakingly reconstructs the seven sacraments of the Church and its liturgical processions including, most notably, an excellent overview of the celebration of Corpus Christi on both sides of the Atlantic.

To help explain the coalescence of European and indigenous worldviews, Lara highlights the deployment of Nahua solar and blood “root metaphors” to communicate Christian ideas. Yet, he does not always articulate how these metaphorical transpositions may have been variously understood nor how they modified Christian orthodoxy. Many metaphorical surrogates moved beyond figures of speech, such as the palpable properties of the indigenous corn and amaranth dough deity, who could be seen as well as smelled and tasted. It is the emphatic materiality of the Nahua metaphor that drives Lara’s highly original interpretation of ritual blood sacrifice in both religions. A “comestible divinity” such as the corn dough deity was recycled as an apt surrogate for the transubstantiated body of Christ in the Eucharistic wafer; one might ask, nonetheless, how it was received—more somatic than symbolic, more Nahua than Christian? While the author acknowledges the difficulty in gauging native response and the slippage in the process of translation, the potential for negative implications is explored less well. In Max Harris’ words, the very act of transcribing is transformative, an “inherently dialogical gamble.” [End Page 624]

In his most substantive contribution, Lara’s focus on ritual provides an authentic entry into how native cultures retained and communicated knowledge. As much as friars subscribed to the view that liturgical practices and public spectacles were a mechanism for religious inculturation and social solidarity, they ignored or, more likely, suppressed the degree to which it could open up resistant notions and intensify difference. Lara adopts some of these mendicant blindspots, insulating the activities he describes as though monasteries were self-contained universes immune to outside pressures and asymmetries of power. Thus, Lara restates his earlier conclusion, that is, worship had a more profound impact than political hegemony on the native population, without noting, in my view, that they are inseparable. Aware that native Americans were co-opting popular festivals to assert their own ethnic ancestry and claim certain prerogatives, colonial authorities were constantly on their guard that rituals not devolve into unseemly behavior, or worse, help instigate heretical or subversive activity. Although the dynamism of intercultural dialogue has been notoriously resistant to labeling, Lara has chosen to reinstate Hugo Nutini’s “guided syncretism,” a term that seems to underscore the unilateral intentionality of the European friar. And what of the unguided and random, the inadvertent and surreptitious, surely components that also characterize the high passions aroused by ritual activity...

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