Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (review)

Lara's book presents a visually engaging cultural history of how sixteenth-century Christian liturgical and ritual practices were transported, translated, and reinvented by early Catholic missionaries and native collaborators in New Spain. Religious missionaries actively sought similarities between Christian and Aztec religious practices, to introduce the Christian doctrine through a crafty re-working of Aztec "root metaphors" "sun, heart, and blood" to Christ crucified (18). Focusing on the deployment of the human body (Christ's body) and Blood (both central to Christian and Aztec body-centered religions)—Lara explores how the Seven holy Sacraments of the Christian Church and liturgical processions were presented to the post-Conquest natives and the potential multivalent meanings these may have contained. Lara achieves this successfully by employing a rich variety of primary "texts": Aztec and Christian architecture and sculpture; Aztec codices; mural and feather paintings; religious theatre and processions; and liturgical texts.

The chapters in the book are arranged thematically and not chronologically as "Neither the friars' memoirs nor the later writings of Nahua-Christian historians offer us a single consistent view of sacramental practice. Much of what was attempted appears localized, spontaneous, and reactive to the moment or to the circumstance, guided more by the creativity of a particular individual … or group …." (12). The Introduction presents the importance of the centrality of the human body and how corporeal metaphors can act as filters with which to view Christian or Aztec cosmovisions (i.e., Christ' body and blood as Jerusalem; i.e., their axis mundi, or Tenochtitlan as the axis mundi and mythical center of solar and sanguinal metaphors for the Aztecs). The Introduction also emphasizes the importance of visual textuality by including "indigenous codices, woodblock prints, copper engravings, printed murals, carved sculpture, and the like" as these "amplify, and clarify the written word" (12). In Chapters 1, 2, and 3 Lara provides the reader with the foundations for understanding Old World religious precedents and politics in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation and how these were transported to the New World where there was an obsession with instilling in the new world converts, not only proper Christian beliefs but the correct enactment (performance) of these. Lara reminds us of the pagan sources of certain Christian concepts and that "it was a syncretistic religion from the start" (17). Thus the missionaries' project to teach the Christian doctrine to New World natives was nothing new—previous missionary activity in Europe and Asia had already prompted the missionaries with effective hands-on pedagogical strategies—but of finding "forceful equivalents" and "ritual substitution" (19) in a traumatized post-Conquest society (Aztecs) faced with a spiritual void. Chapter 3 is one of the most engaging as it provides an insightful background into the politics of pedagogy of the "two great preaching orders" present in New Spain: The more layman-friendly "colorful sermo humilis" of the Franciscans, which employed highly audio-visual pedagogical strategies vs. the more high-brow "scholastic logical, sermo modernus" of the Dominicans (41). Paying particular attention to Franciscan audio-visual and sensorial pedagogical practices, Lara reminds us that the body itself and its theatricalization was a site for message encoding and "thus, in approaching the evangelization of New Spain, we must reverse the Western paradigm of logocentricity and privilege the human experience of sight" (48). Worth noting here are the "multilingual and bivisual experiments in communication" of Fray Pedro de Gante (1523) and Friar Jacobo de Testera (1529), who were some of the first missionaries in the New World to create catechisms composed entirely of pictographs and to preach with pictures; and Friar Diego Valadés's Rhetorica Christiana's copper etchings, which Lara employs in his analysis (Chapter 4) of how these five sacraments (Baptism, Penance, Matrimony, Communion, Extreme Unction) were taught and reworked into Nahua (Aztec) cosmovision. [Chapter 5 deals with the sacraments of Holy Orders, Confirmation not represented in Valadés's etching.]

Central to Lara's analysis of...