Society and the Sacred: New World Transformations of Religion and Identity

From the very beginnings of the conquest, Spain held America to be a "supremely sacred space."¹ Despite disagreements between church and Crown as to how this sacred space should be administered, this holy geography underwrote all facets of Spain's conquest and colonization of the New World. Gripped by post-Tridentine fervor and emboldened by the literal and figurative distance from Europe and its contaminated Christianity, Spain sought to make up for its losses in the Old World with a fresh start in the New. Religion—understood as both the institutional practices of the church, and the cultural impact in society of the ideology and behaviors initiated by these practices—was at the heart of the imperial project and, consequently, "woven deeply into the fabric of daily life."² Accordingly, scholars of colonial Hispanic America must address religion's presence in many different areas of study if they are to tackle the mentalities of the period.

The intersection of religion and culture, and its concomitant and inevitable role in the production of identities, preoccupies the texts under consideration here. In the colonial period, religion operated as the ground zero of the problematic category of identity, which has so preoccupied Latin Americanists working on an array of historical periods: it lies at the core of the tensions defining the triptych of race, class, and gender, as social groups processed the identities assigned to them by the imperial project, struggling to establish their own subjectivity. Identity and religion were both irrevocably transformed as a result of this juxtaposition.

The works discussed here address the complexities and specificities of a New World spiritual culture that was the necessary product of the convergence and coexistence of identities and belief systems brought together under the banner of Catholicism. Asunción Lavrin's magisterial Brides of Christ establishes the centrality of convent space to colonial Mexican society, showing how this space both influenced and interacted with the outside world—the siglo—in myriad ways. She demonstrates how the Mexican cloister—which was established as a bastion of white Spanish values—served as an incubator for the production of spiritual models deeply permeated by peculiarly American issues of race, class, and gender. Lavrin articulates the problematic protagonism of women in New World religious transformations: "Religious women were not excluded from the collective memory of the church or New Spain, but how they were included is critical in understanding the process of memory building among men and women of the cloth. The historical effort to legitimize the role of the church in the forging of 'new' Spain in the Indies would include nuns because they were regarded as embodying the grace that Christ granted to the humble and simple" (320). Nuns, however, were not content to have their role be purely symbolic and did not always accept the identities assigned to them and to convent space in New World religious culture.

Lavrin explores multiple facets of convent life and its significance to female religious through a series of loosely structured entries, some chronological ("The Path to the Convent," "The Novice Becomes a Nun") and others more thematic ("Sexuality: A Challenge to Chastity," "Writing in the Cloisters"). The book is detailed yet kaleidoscopic, breaking down the intricacies of convent life while recounting the development of female...