Peasants and Religion

Mats Lundahl, Jan Lundius

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134687640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This book examines the relationship between economics, politics and religion through the case of Olivorio Mateo and the religious movement he inspired from 1908 in the Dominican Republic. The authors explore how and why the new religion was formed, and why it was so successful. Comparing this case with other peasant movements, they show ways in which folk religion serves as a response to particular problems which arise in peasant societies during times of stress.

1 Introduction

The landscape of the southwestern part of the Dominican Republic is strange and varied. Sugar cane fields, rice paddies and fertile plains are set among inaccessible mountain ranges, deserts and salt marshes. This part of the country has been a place of refuge for many insurgents. Here runaway slaves established their own communities and many a fierce battle was fought between Haitian and Dominican armies. The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic has always been vague and the exchange between the peoples on the two sides of the frontier has been very lively. The governments of both countries have repeatedly attempted to increase their control over the border area in order to obliterate the possibilities of using the remote mountain areas as a base for insurrections.

In these areas the population nourishes a well-founded suspicion of authorities. Most of the fertile areas are in the hands of a few big landowners and the majority of the peasants seek their meager livelihood in poor, insufficient plots. The southwest is the poorest and most neglected part of the Dominican Republic and has thus been an excellent hotbed for peasant movements of different kinds.

In the present work we analyze one such peasant movement that was quenched in blood—not only once, but twice. This movement is of a messianic type that has been observed elsewhere in poor rural areas of Latin America:

All are built around one individual, who is held to have supernatural attributes and who prophesies catastrophes from which only his followers will escape. The followers seek either to release the spell from an enchanted Kingdom or to found a Holy City, thus carrying into practice the forms of behaviour counselled by their leader. All these messianic Kingdoms, moreover, have the same characteristics; they are envisaged as celestial kingdoms with miraculous qualities which shall come into being in this world. There will be no sickness, and men will not need to work; there will be universal happiness in the abode of the saints. The communities formed in this spirit are almost invariably destroyed by the forces of global society.¹

The movement discussed in the present work came into being during times of social and economic crisis. It can thus be analyzed with tools from the social sciences. We will view peasant religion as a strategy employed to meet particular problems and tensions that arise within peasant society during periods of stress. Religious movements may then serve as collective attempts to overcome the perceived threats to the community.

The subject

Some time around the year 1910, a fifty-year-old field hand from the San Juan Valley in the southwestern part of the Dominican Republic, named Olivorio Mateo, underwent a mystical experience that completely changed not only his own life, but also that of many others. He disappeared, was believed to be dead, and when he reappeared claimed that God had ordered him to preach and heal the sick. Olivorio thus initiated a career as faith healer, prophet and local leader. His followers—mainly illiterate peasants and farm hands—were inclined to believe that he was divine.

Others, however—particularly ‘progressive’ landowners, merchants and local authorities—considered Olivorio to be an obstacle to the wheel of progress and a representative of ‘African obscurantism’ and backwardness in general. When the Dominican Republic was occupied by the United States in 1916, Olivorio was put on the American list of suspect individuals, and after a turbulent career of slightly more than a decade, he was killed by the US marines, only to be converted into a spiritual presence which, almost forty years after his death, would serve as the main inspiration for another manifestation of the movement that eventually was to be quenched in blood as well.

In 1961, the members of a family named Ventura founded a holy city in Palma Sola, northwest of San Juan de la Maguana. At that time, one of the most notorious of all Latin American dictators, Rafael Trujillo, had held the Dominican Republic in his iron grip for more than thirty years, suppressing all popular movements, including religious ones. Trujillo was murdered at the end of May 1961 and it was then only a matter of weeks before the Palma Sola movement sprang into full bloom. The Venturas had stated that their mission would come to an end on 1 January 1963. On 28 December 1962, however, the Dominican military moved into Palma Sola and massacred its inhabitants.

The present study constitutes an investigation of how and why the Olivorista religion was formed, why the movement and its revival in Palma Sola were successful in attracting large numbers of followers and why on both occasions it was violently suppressed. Our analysis will combine tools and methods from various social sciences. In this chapter we provide an overview of the approach that we will follow in the book.

The local scene

Every person lives and acts within a particular environment. A social phenomenon, like a religious movement, must be analyzed in relation to the cultural means of expression that are at the disposal of the adherents to a particular faith. This leads to a study not only of the interaction between individuals, their sets of values and attitudes, their relationship to the ecosystem, their economic activities, etc., but also of the historical, economic and sociological roots of the society that generates the kind of faith which triggers messianic movements.

When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Olivorio Mateo, an illiterate peasant, succeeded in gathering a large following around himself and for several years was able to challenge the power of landowners, merchants and foreign troops within an entire province, he could do so due to the particular conditions that prevailed within the area of his activities. The San Juan Valley constantly witnesses the rise and fall of soothsay-ers and faith healers, but none of them have achieved the almost instant success and strong influence of Olivorio Mateo (and the Ventura brothers several years later). Extraordinary circumstances underpinned the attraction of such personalities.

The majority of the believers in the message divulged by Olivorio and the Venturas have been peasants and as such they live and work within a production landscape, making use of their immediate physical environment. Any change affecting their surroundings is likely to influence their livelihood and consequently their view of the world. It is seemingly contradictory that even if the peasant world is highly dynamic, in the sense that slight climatological changes and political turbulence may have severe repercussions on the peasants’ welfare and opinions, their traditions and beliefs still tend to reflect a kind of long-term stability in both the physical and social landscape.

In the case of the San Juan Valley this stability is provided by a production landscape to which a religious system has been adapted. A belief system has been constituted by ideas and traditions originating from both Europe and Africa: a unique blend which can be traced in all the aspects of the religious movements we will consider. Peasants’ religious convictions tend to serve ‘practical’ ends and are accordingly influenced by changes in their material welfare and economic output—a pattern that becomes obvious when studying the Olivorista movement in the San Juan Valley.

As faith healers like Olivorio are always present in the San Juan Valley, the extraordinary attraction he exercised must be related not only to his particular personality, but also to structural changes that occured at the time of his appearance, i.e. the transformation of traditional life, primarily by the consolidation of agricultural holdings and the substitution of market-oriented production for subsistence farming and cattle raising.

Just as the Olivorista movement was an answer to sociopolitical changes that occured in the San Juan Valley in the 1910s and 1920s, its continuation initiated by the Ventura brothers in Palma Sola in 1961 was a local response to feelings of anomie that had taken hold of many Dominicans in the agitated aftermath of the murder of Trujillo. The Trujillo years had brought thorough structural change to Dominican society and the San Juan Valley had not escaped the dictator’s ruthless rule. Several followers of Olivorio Mateo suffered severe persecution. With the dictator gone, however, the lid was lifted from the boiling pot of Sanjuanero discontent. As in Olivorio’s times the actions and the speech of the peasants in the San Juan Valley were steeped in religious language and behavior. Their protest took the form of an Olivorista revival. In a highly volatile atmosphere of political tension, the official response to the movement in Palma Sola was fierce and meshed in political machinations. The result was a ruthless massacre of unarmed peasants and a heritage of unanswered questions which still haunt political debate in the Dominican Republic.

Religious beliefs and traditions in the San Juan Valley result from a symbiosis between economic and ‘spiritual’ factors. The valley has served as a melting pot for Indian, African and European creeds and only a long historical perspective can illuminate some essential components of the intricate ‘ideology’ which constitutes present-day Olivorismo. The same applies to the particular socioeconomic environment which emerged in the valley, and when stating that Olivorista religion is based on the economic reality of the Sanjuanero peasantry, it must also be said that the socioeconomic reality is influenced by religious notions.

The long and winding road leading up to present-day Sanjuanero religiosity passes through religious fraternities in medieval Europe and West Africa and beliefs in ‘suprahuman’ powers like the Holy Spirit in Europe and Ashé among African Yoruba. Fertility cults, processions, dancing, singing, drumming, possession beliefs, communal celebrations, etc., whose origins can be found in various geographical contexts, have been fused together by the people in San Juan Valley and adapted to their particular socioeconomic environment.

An account of the economic history of the San Juan Valley leads us back in time to the establishment of an economic system based on forced Indian labor which subsequently led to imports of African slaves and sugar production. When the importance of sugar dwindled and political considerations depopulated the area around San Juan de la Maguana, cattle breeding grew in importance, to be replaced by food production for the market only during the present century, a shift that influenced landownership structures and eventually triggered the rise of the Olivorista movement. In order to understand and analyze the socioeconomic situation which prevailed in the San Juan Valley at the time of Olivorio Mateo’s emergence as a ‘living god’, a long historical perspective must be taken, and we must analyze the complicated process in which the political realities of the time and the ethnic composition of the Sanjuaneros interacted and created a peculiar culture which constituted a fertile breedin...