Die Mayordomias in Tequila: Das Religiose Amtersystem Heutiger Nahua in Mexiko (review)

Die Mayordomías in Tequila: Das Religinse �mtersystem Heutiger Nahua in Mexiko. By Brigitte Hülsewiede. Institut für Vnlkerkunde der Albert-Ludwigs-Universit�t, Freiburg. Ethnologische Studien, Book 28 (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1997. ix + 548 pp., introduction, photo, glossary, bibliography. 68.80 DM cloth.)

Yet another book on the cargo system of an indigenous Mexican community, this time on a Nahua town in Veracruz. Do we need another? I had strong doubts upon picking up this long book, but by the end, the answer was definitely yes. Exceptionally careful and detailed ethnographic inquiry conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s has led Hülsewiede to a new, far-reaching and exciting interpretation of the meaning and purpose of the rituals of saint worship widely known as mayordomía. There is good reason to suspect her findings to be widely applicable throughout Mesoamerica, and Hülsewiede both implicitly highlights a shortcoming in much prior research on this age-old topic and points the way to new, more profound study of the topic.

The author’s remarkable finding is that mayordomía rituals effect the movement of souls back and forth between This World and the Other World. These are mirror-imaged planes of existence—for Other World denizens, theirs is “This World” and ours is the “Other World.” Death in our world corresponds with birth in the other, and the movement of souls through the stages of life and death in one are matched by mirrored-image steps in the other.¹ Many students of the mayordomía have observed that a village harbors two or more images of a single saint and that these are handled and manipulated differently at different stages in mayordomía ritual. Hülsewiede argues convincingly that these images are the corporeal representations of a saint’s alter-ego, resident at any point in time on different sides of the This World–Other World divide. She plumbs diverse moments and details of mayordomía ritual to establish that those highly formulaic and time-consuming exercises are effecting the This Worldly death of the saintly alter-ego resident among us and its transition, over time, to the Other World so that the Other Worldly alter-ego of the saint, the one to be feted at the high point of the mayordomía cycle, can die and be reborn in This World, to bask awhile in the adoration of its community here.

There is far more to Hülsewiede’s analysis than can be recapitulated in this short review. In so deftly linking mayordomía to a cult of the dead (her prior study of family rituals, especially baptism and death rituals, helped point the way), the author opens up areas for study and interpretation that have been passed over by many others. For example, Hülsewiede paid great attention to ritual interactions between a mayordomo—the official currently in charge of a saint’s celebration—and the person chosen to assume the cargo at the end of the current cycle. Over weeks and months following the nomination of a new cargo holder until that person’s final assumption of duties, a complex ritual interaction between the two reflects their implicit roles as parents and caregivers of the alter-souls of the saint. That is to say, the in-coming and out-going mayordomos live in the same Nahua village but function as counterparts in different worlds, working together or in synchrony with prayer, music, incense, and sacrifice to effect the movement of the saint’s alter soul from one realm to the other and back again.

Prior research, in hindsight, provided hints of this future interpretation that Hülsewiede has so well developed. Hugo Nutini’s Todos Santos in Rural Tlaxcala (Princeton, NJ, 1988) revealed that until the eighteenth century, the explicit cult of the dead provided a multitude of the festivals in the still-developing cargo system there...