Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Colonial Mexico (review)

Eleanor Wake’s impressive new book on the perennially fascinating topic of the indigenous impact on the built and visual culture of early New Spain is a welcome addition to the literature in English. Its elegant, jargon-free writing; methodical overview of the secondary literature; and deft detective work based on extensive fieldwork will make this book invaluable as a primer for the subject for undergraduates, graduates, and interested members of the general public.

The book takes us on a journey through time and space—both real and cosmic—beginning with overviews of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican beliefs and rituals centered on geography, the calendar, agriculture, and fertility, focusing on the role of plants and especially flowers, the leitmotif of this book. Chapters 2 and 3 explore familiar territory, telling the story of the implementation of Christianity by the conquerors on the existing sacred environment and the indigenous reappropriation of their own world through selective adaptation and interpretation of these alien forms and beliefs. We see again the ingenious systems of indoctrination used by the friar missionaries and the ways that the Nahua employed them to their own ends, as well as the cycles of tolerance and intolerance imposed by a Church that at times had little idea of what was going on. Chapter 4 rehearses the history of the building of the great mission churches and the ways in which their unique structures (open chapels, posas) reflect the pre-Hispanic ritual environment and its colonial inheritor and how they represented continuity as much as novelty for the indigenous populations. Her relation of indigenous depictions of churches to representations of the altepetl (Nahua community) is particularly helpful.

Much of this material is well known even to a nonscholarly audience and indebted to George Kubler, Joseph Baird, John MacAndrew, Jeanette Peterson, Samuel Edgerton, and Jaime Lara—just to name some of those writing in English. Yet there is not enough acknowledgment of the work of these pioneers and contemporaries, or even a clear statement about what is original and what is not. As a consequence, the survey of the literature in the introduction seems dated—the author’s points are well taken about the indigenous contribution to colonial culture, but she fights a battle against a Eurocentric mainstream literature that was won two decades ago. More problematic is her claim that she is using sources “hitherto not included in a study of this kind” (p. 8) such as lienzos (map documents), which are the foundation of a groundswell of recent scholarship (e.g., Barbara Mundy and Lara, both of whom she cites, but not enough). Her neglect of Lara’s work and dismissiveness toward that of Edgerton prevents her from opening up a fresh scholarly dialogue, and it is an oversight not to bring in some of the literature on colonial South America (Ramón Mujica, Adrian Locke, Thomas Cummins, Elena Phipps), which deals precisely with issues of indigenous participation in colonial architecture and visual culture and has been engaging the Mexican material directly for more than twenty years.

Wake is at her most impressive in the later part of the book (chapters 5 and 6). Her meticulous and original study of the location and identification of pre-Hispanic embedded stones in colonial churches and their possible alignment with solar activity and radial sightlines with elements of sacred geography (mountains in particular) is very provocative, as is her unprecedented identification of this sacred geography in the backgrounds of Christian mural paintings. Also intriguing is her emphasis on flowers and their relationship to flower imagery in the Nahua Cantares Mexicanos (sacred songs)—although in this case the reader wishes she had gone further, reproducing some of the texts in full and going back over the material treated earlier in the book. In fact, it would have been preferable to have these splendid texts at the beginning rather than the conclusion.

In sum, this is a very useful...